Languid stretches of Americana will never be a bad place to set a noir. Whether the visual language of cinema is your thing or you just get off on weird and sudden violence, everything hits harder when the backdrop looks like an Earl Cunningham postcard.

Honey Don’t!

Honey O’Donahue is a private investigator in Bakersfield, California; someone is dead, and the car accident that killed her probably wasn’t an accident, and also might not have been the thing that killed her; there’s a local cult that doesn’t make much of an effort to hide the fact that it’s a cult; an aggressively fatal femme fatale is here representing a foreign drug syndicate; a weird old man is wandering around town telling people he loves them; everybody is fucking, except for Charlie Day; some or all of this might be related. None of the preceding will end up mattering in the grand scheme of things, because there is no grand scheme of things, which is the best way to structure a detective story.

I like the Ethan Coen/Tricia Cooke pseudo-B-movie turn. It’s fun, movies are always a little zestier when they don’t fit neatly into any one genre, and giving Margaret Qualley an excuse to keep modulating her Southern accent up and down a weird Hillbilly-Business Casual spectrum is always a hoot. In fact, I liked Honey Don’t! more than I thought I would, more than other people seemed to (woof, that Rotten Tomatoes score) and more than I liked Drive-Away Dolls. The reasons for this are many, and best explained by contrasting the two films’ respective approaches to dildos, as measured on my proprietary Dildo Application Dynamics (D.A.D.) scale:

Honey Don’! doesn’t feel like it’s trying as hard as Drive-Away Dolls to work the particulars of its characters into the larger tapestry of America’s criminal underbelly. Dildos are too prevalent in Drive-Away Dolls. I don’t mind a pink ramhammer as a plot device (that’s actually kind of magical) but the sheer amount of dildo references comes across as trying too hard. In Honey Don’t! we still get a strong impression of our protagonist, but it’s done organically. We simply see Honey cleaning her sex toys after a night with a new lady friend. She’s all business; the thirstiness is implied. I respect a dildo that does not insist upon itself.

And who is this respectable cleaner of dildos? I’m glad I asked! See, most noir detectives have an emotional range that stretches all the way from Humphrey Bogart Except He’s Not Smoking to Humphrey Bogart But He Is Smoking; because these characters are vehicles to explore a world, and because being Humphrey Bogart is like being God if God was born to wear a fedora, this is usually fine.

But there are interesting angles to O’Donahue, ones that we don’t often see in most noir protagonists. Her Playful-Professional dial is in constant flux, whirring and recalibrating to maximize her investigative effectiveness and minimize her emotional exposure during each conversation. She’s deliberate and professional, but not detached. She even seems to genuinely like a lot of people! She’s lightly bemused by Charlie Day’s regular and awful attempts to woo her; she banters with her young relatives; she likes getting laid. Most noir detectives don’t do much in the way of Not Murder. They’re usually pretty honed in on Murder.

And the change is more than just nice, because giving us a detective who fucks also gives us all the personal slip-ups you would expect from a detective who fucks. Honey is a human lie-detector in her default setting, but when she sets her sights on a lady, all of her better instincts turn to shit. She doesn’t just flirt with ladies before realizing they’re dangerous, she can’t help but do it after she realizes they’re dangerous. The sheer amount of fucking in this movie and what it means for each character’s relationship with Boning is a topic that deserves its own article. For our purposes here, I just like my lead character having a gaping hole in her vision. Dumb fucking mistakes make for interesting characters.

This deviation from standard neo-noir structure extends to the supporting cast, too. The characters in Honey’s world aren’t dripping with sleaze so much as burdened with normalcy. Honey and her love interests (Aubrey Plaza and Lera Abova, both insanely good) are the only things close to true noir characters in the story, and everybody else seems to know it. Charlie Day is less the antagonistic police contact than an amiable loser. Chris Evans’ cult leader wants to be a charismatic crime lord, but he’s so small-time in everything he does no one really takes him seriously. Their inability to fill common genre roles is a good thing! Without obvious tropes to focus on, we detach from viewing the story solely through a genre lens and instead take a more character-driven view of Honey’s world. The specifics of the story becomes less important than the role the characters inhabit in it. Fuck yes! More mess, please; more weird colors outside the lines – more fascinatingly incongruous shit.

The End

Typically, when you’re watching a noir detective story and it ends you nod and say something like, “yes, that would be about it, now, wouldn’t it. I thought that real estate developer was up to no good.”

It’s unusual to actually wonder about the detective’s life outside the events of the story. The fact that there’s enough character in Honey O’Donahue to make her compelling beyond the trappings of the narrative is some nifty character shit! You don’t normally get that kind of value in your detective story. I might be the only person on Earth looking forward to the last entry in the Coen/Cooke trilogy, but that’s fine by me.