“Wow, you’ve had a full day.”
Beanie Feldstein drops that line at the end of the madcap first trailer for “Drive-Away Dolls,” a queer road-trip comedy that director Ethan Coen shot throughout the Pittsburgh area late last year. The then-untitled film was officially given a name and a Sept. 22 theatrical release date in April.
On Friday, Focus Features put out the first official trailer for “Drive-Away Dolls,” which stars Margaret Qualley (“Maid”) and Geraldine Viswanathan (“Blockers”) as two friends who skip town and quickly find themselves being pursued by some seedy characters. The cheeky tagline on the official “Drive-Away Dolls poster, “a story of two ladies going down south,” says it all about this film’s tone and comic sensibility.
“This comedy caper follows Jamie [Qualley], an uninhibited free spirit bemoaning yet another breakup with a girlfriend, and her demure friend Marian [Viswanathan], who desperately needs to loosen up,” reads a “Drive-Away Dolls” plot description. “In search of a fresh start, the two embark on an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee, but things quickly go awry when they cross paths with a group of inept criminals along the way.”
There isn’t a lot of Western Pennsylvania obviously featured in this trailer, though at one point, Bill Camp — also known for the Pittsburgh-filmed Showtime-turned-Amazon-Freevee series “American Rust” — answers the phone with the curt greeting, “Curly’s Driveaway, Pennsylvania’s most trusted name in car delivery.”
This is Coen’s first solo directing gig without his brother, Joel, who had previously split off from brother Ethan to direct 2021’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” by himself. Ethan co-write the “Drive-Away Dolls” script with his wife, Tricia Cooke. Its cast also includes Matt Damon, “The Last of Us” breakout Pedro Pascal and Colman Domingo, who recently starred in Netflix’s upcoming Pittsburgh-shot Bayard Rustin biopic “Rustin.”
Cooke and Coen spoke to Variety’s Jazz Tangcay about “Drive-Away Dolls” in an interview released Friday morning. Coen said that their “chase intrigue movie” was “filthy fun” and a fairly straightforward comedy. As someone who has “always identified as queer,” it was important to Cooke that the film remained “fun” and “playful” while foregrounding queer characters.
“There aren’t that many of these films about lesbians,” Cooke told Tangcay. “It’s important that it’s a queer movie and important that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.”
She went on to reveal that a big inspiration for “Drive-Away Dolls” was the 1992 Drew Barrymore thriller “Poison Ivy.” Both Coen and Cooke kept repeating the word “fun” to describe many aspects of their film, including the energy all the performers brought to help realize their ambitions for it.
“The actors sink their teeth into it and they just have fun with it,” Coen teased, “and they go to town with it.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxel222.
First Published: June 23, 2023, 8:00 p.m.
Updated: June 24, 2023, 11:07 a.m.