A mysterious brunette, with a bob hairdo and a snazzy leopard-print outfit, stands at the top of a cliff somewhere in the desert. She approaches the scene of a deadly car crash below. The vehicle is overturned; the driver’s body, lifeless and bloodied, upside-down. The woman (Lera Abova) examines the dead body and slides a ring, emblazoned with some bizarre insignia, from its finger, ensuring that first responders don’t find it. Mission complete, she hops back on her motorbike and goes skinny-dipping in a nearby lake.

It’s a provocative opening sequence, disturbing and sexy and intriguing all at once. It’s a shame that the rest of Honey Don’t! — the latest movie from the still Joel-less Ethan Coen — never lives up to the promise of its audacious start.

The film is a loose companion piece to last year’s perversely fun Drive-Away Dolls. Both are lesbian-themed crime comedies starring Margaret Qualley exercising her fast-talking comedic muscles. Both were written by Coen in collaboration with his (self-described lesbian) wife, editor Tricia Cooke, who reportedly also served as co-director (though she’s not credited as such). And both are entries in what Coen has described as a “lesbian B-movie trilogy.”

But Drive-Away Dolls had a certain madcap momentum that its successor, unfortunately, fails to match. Set in Bakersfield, California, Honey Don’t! is darker by far, a detective story in the neo-noir lineage, with flashes of cartoonish, Tarantino-style violence that jar awkwardly with an otherwise comical tone. Its puzzle pieces — which include a savvy private eye, a charismatic cult leader, a no-nonsense female cop, several brutal murders, and a teenage girl’s disappearance — are intriguing but don’t cohere, amounting to a film that’s never quite as subversive or exhilarating as the erstwhile genre pictures it pays homage to.

As in Drive-Away Dolls, Qualley plays a quick-witted queer woman, this time a private investigator named Honey O’Donahue. Honey seems to spend her days confirming clients’ suspicions about their cheating spouses and fending off clueless advances from a greasy police detective (Charlie Day), who won’t accept that she’s gay. (A joke that was funnier in Drive-Away Dolls, I’ll add.)

But once she learns that the aforementioned car-crash victim had tried to seek out her services shortly before her demise, Honey begins investigating the woman’s supposedly accidental death and gets sucked into a mystery involving a cult-like Christian church called the Four-Way Temple, led by the charismatic Pastor Drew (Chris Evans). Evans revels in the sliminess of this role, which sees him having tightly choreographed threesomes with congregants and preaching next to blown-up glamour shots of himself, though the script doesn’t give the character much of an arc.

Then Honey’s own niece, an angsty teen played by Talia Ryder (The Sweet East), goes missing, and the investigation becomes personal. Meanwhile, Honey also requires the assistance of a tough-talking cop named MG Falcone (a world-weary Aubrey Plaza), which sparks a steamy affair. (What is it with Coen/Cooke and lesbian cops?) Their rendezvous include public fingering at a dive bar and passionate lovemaking at Honey’s apartment. But MG turns out to carry some secrets of her own.

Honey Don’t! — named after a Carl Perkins tune — at least looks stylish as hell. A rollicking opening sequence, set to the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” whisks us through the rundown streets of Bakersfield and impressively transforms storefront signage into opening credits. Ari Wegner’s cinematography makes fantastic use of those sun-kissed Bakersfield exteriors — neo-noir doesn’t get much more colorful than this! And Qualley is magnetic as ever, click-clacking down the steep incline of the accident in a polka-dot dress and red heels.

So why, with all this style and inspiration, does Honey Don’t! feel slightly limp? The multi-pronged, noir-ish plot pieces never come together in a satisfying way. You could say the convoluted storyline never made much sense in The Big Lebowski either, but that movie had enough absurdist humor and unforgettable characters to let the plot fade into the background. Honey Don’t! doesn’t, and its plot largely hinges on a third-act twist that both strains credulity and deflates much of the mystery of what came before it.

Another issue with the film is that it fails to establish a clear sense of its own setting. Well, the place is clear — we’re in downwardly mobile Bakersfield, California, named explicitly throughout the film. But when? Drive-Away Dolls was distinctly set in the late ’90s, which made sense both logically (it’s one of those plots that wouldn’t work if the characters had iPhones and Google Maps) and comedically (an excuse for gags about Phish and exes who work for Ralph Nader).

Honey Don’t! is more temporally confused. It feels like a period piece without a defined period. It’s ostensibly set in the present (there’s a Covid-19 joke within the first 15 minutes, and a visual gag involving a MAGA sticker), but Honey’s wood-paneled office and fondness for payphones (for which a local cop teases her) feel like 20th-century signifiers. Plus, throughout Qualley’s performance, she speaks in a stylized, antiquated manner, like someone who learned to talk from watching old Katharine Hepburn movies. This is a character who says things like, “You find out what kind of hanky-panky is going on in this place, it’s a feather in your cap!”

The jumbled setting shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, really, yet it’s reflective of a certain slapdash quality in Honey Don’t! — a feeling that the film was rushed into production to build on the momentum from Drive-Away Dolls, when the script could have used another pass.

It is, admittedly, refreshing to see a Coen brother popping out movies at such a nimble, un-self-conscious pace. Joel and Ethan used to move from one project to the next with urgency and inspiration, but, after the late-career masterpiece Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), their output slowed considerably, then stopped altogether after 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The elder Coen brother has directed only one movie this decade, 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, while Ethan and Cooke have already given us three, if you include the 2022 rockumentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. It feels ungrateful to complain, doesn’t it?

But between Honey Don’t! and the aforementioned documentary, quality control has taken a hit. This film is clearly an affectionate homage to the works of low-budget ’70s genre filmmakers like Russ Meyer and John Waters, artists who worked quickly, cheaply, and without fretting over matters of good taste. But Honey Don’t! is not a B-movie, and therein lies a bit of artistic dissonance. This is a well-funded studio movie starring Hollywood A-listers; like Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, it yearns to emulate a cheapy, trashy sensibility that clashes with the material realities of its production. Ethan Coen, with his brother, remains among the most original American filmmakers of the past 40 years, but this film’s thrills are largely imitative.

Honey Don’t! (★★☆☆☆) is rated R and is now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.