In his first solo directing venture, “Drive-Away Dolls,” Ethan Coen goes where no Coen brothers film has gone before: the lesbian sex comedy. The noir-inflected road-trip flick comes from a script by Coen and his longtime editor and wife, Tricia Cooke, who have been toying with the idea of making a trilogy of lesbian B-movies for decades. To bring the first of those films to life, the couple enlisted stars Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan to play best friends Jamie and Marian, who find themselves entangled in a bizarre criminal world — and each other — after picking up the wrong rental car en route to Tallahassee, Florida.

“Drive-Away Dolls,” which arrives in theaters Feb. 23, features a stacked supporting cast that includes Coen brothers regulars alongside first-time collaborators such as Pedro Pascal, Colman Domingo, Miley Cyrus and Beanie Feldstein, who delivers a scene-stealing performance as Jamie’s hotheaded cop ex-girlfriend, Sukie.
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“I can’t even believe I get to be in the lineage of female cop characters that they’ve created over the years. When you think of Ed, you think of Marge, they are burned into your brain because they’re so specific,” Feldstein said, referring to Holly Hunter’s character in “Raising Arizona” and Francis McDormand’s in “Fargo.” “Every Coen, and in this case Coen and Cooke, character has such a specific syntax and timbre.”
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Like Coen female cops from the past, Sukie and her very specific modus operandi are driving forces in the film, despite Feldstein not being billed as a lead. In one of the first scenes, Sukie goes into a rage watching her loquacious girlfriend, Jamie (Qualley), strut in front of a crowd at their local lesbian bar, going after her onstage and putting an end to their romance. Finding herself without a place to stay, Jamie convinces her best friend, Marian (Viswanathan), who’s in desperate need of getting laid, to turn a pre-planned drive down to Tallahassee into a lesbians-gone-wild road trip. And that’s when they mistakenly pick up a rental car carrying some very unique, illicit cargo in the trunk — as well as a tail of goons and shadowy figures looking to recover the lost items.