A wild ride, this kooky road trip is one worth taking

3 stars

It's not often as a film critic that a film comes along a little under the radar that you can enjoy having no idea what you're headed into, and that was my experience with Drive-Away Dolls.

The name helps a little with that mystery because I had no idea that a "drive-away" refers to an arrangement where you can be paid to drive a car to a location - say taking a rental car back to its city of origin, a city you happen to be headed to anyways.

The film is something of an aesthetic mash-up of 1990s urban queer cinema like Go Fish or Bedrooms and Hallways spliced into the smart crime kook of the Raising Arizona-era Coen Brothers.

There's a reason for that, and its because one half of the Coens, Ethan Coen, directs and shares screenwriting and producing credits with Tricia Cooke, his long-time film editor and his wife, making a career change.

There are a ton of delightful filmic references and other genre nods, with cameos from some fairly huge names.

Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Jamie (Margaret Qualley) are taking a road trip to Tallahassee in Florida, both looking for a new life in a city Marian feels a fondness for.

Jamie has just been very publicly dumped by her police officer girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) for being a little too publicly proud of her infidelities, and so she's tagged along with pal Marian's change-of-life plans.

The pair walked into a shady drive-away car returns business owned by Curlie (Bill Camp) who seems to have been expecting a pair wanting to drive a car to Tallahassee.

With the girls on the road and heading through America's deep south, a menacing trio of Arliss and Flint (Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson), led by The Chief (Colman Domingo), arrive at Curlie's caryard.

The girls are unknowingly driving away a car with a hidden stash and now with some very bad guys on their tail.

Meanwhile, Jamie has decided that their new life doesn't have to start when they get to Florida, and she has planned a series of detours that might melt Marian's frigid approach to life and perhaps get her a girlfriend along the way.

Aussie actress Viswanathan does a nice job as the film's "straight man" - that's a deliberately ironic use of that term in a film so deliciously sapphic - against whom Qualley gets to bounce so much energy and to throw the best of the film's one-liners at.

I wrote in my notebook (badly, in the dark) "like a young Andie MacDowell in Sex, Lies and Videotape" and I obviously have a good instinct and a bad grasp of contemporary pop culture, because Qualley is in fact the daughter of actress Andie Macdowell.

It feels like she is channelling another Coen character, Jennifer Jason Leigh's wisecracking screwball comedy dame from The Hudsucker Proxy, reimagined in the body of Shane from The L-Word, a real ladykiller, but not like that other Coen film The Ladykillers.

Qualley makes the film - she subtly draws focus which is hard to do in a film with such little subtlety.

Clarke and Coen write Jamie as worldly-wise and smartly sexual, spewing delicious one-liners.

Coen approaches his visuals with a psychedelic flourish, sometimes quite literally, and with a flowing sense of camera movement between scenes or following his actors across the frame.

The big-star cameos are fleeting but fun, with Miley Cyrus, Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal among them, though I won't spoil their roles.