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It took Joel and Ethan Coen, the seemingly attached-at-the-hip siblings behind such disparate classics as Blood Simple (1984), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), and No Country for Old Men (2007), nearly 40 years to make good on always-there prospects of potentially going solo. Nudged by Ethan’s decision to take a break from moviemaking to focus on theater, Joel went in a more stately direction for his solo debut with the stylish, if otherwise staid, The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021). Less than two and a half years later, Ethan has chosen to goof off for his first narrative movie sans Joel. Drive-Away Dolls is amiable, low-stakes, and often a lot of fun; it also is, like Macbeth, good at making the case that the Coens are at their best together.

The movie starts in Philadelphia in 1999, and tonally resembles the high-energy comedies the brothers only sometimes made together: 1987’s baby-crazed farce Raising Arizona, 2008’s chaotic CIA lark Burn After Reading. It orbits around a pair of best friends, Jamie and Marian (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan), road-tripping to Tallahassee as a means to refresh: Marian from the soul-sucking day-to-day of a boring office job, Jamie from her decidedly not amicable breakup with her long-term girlfriend, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein). (Jamie, who reminds you of old Coen collaborator Holly Hunter with her shoulder-length brown hair and thick-as-molasses Southern accent, is introduced deep in the throes of infidelity.) Their only real goal is to stay a while with Marian’s aunt. Marian, a stick in the mud happiest when she’s reading Henry James in bed, would like to get there as soon as possible. The more free-spirited Jamie wants to take pit stops to sight-see and, by night, hook up. She especially wants to help Marian, who hasn’t gotten laid since her years-ago breakup, with the latter. 

Read the full review on 425.