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It sounds like a fun idea: Let's make a private-eye movie like they did back in the day -- something along the lines of "The Maltese Falcon," with a twisty plot and one-of-a-kind shifty characters. Only instead of the world-weary flatfoot played by Humphrey Bogart, we'll have ... a chipper lesbian, why not? Call her Honey O'Donahue. And instead of the sultry romantic foil played by Mary Astor, let's have a less outgoing lesbian, a cop called MG Falcone (get it?), who'll counterweight a clueless straight cop named Metakawitch, who keeps hitting on Honey even though she keeps telling him she's only into girls, a fact he can't seem to grasp.

You know who might have made a story like this work? The Coen brothers. But the Coens haven't written-directed a movie together since "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," in 2018. In the interim, older brother Joel has taken a well-regarded pass at Shakespeare ("The Tragedy of Macbeth," 2021), while Ethan -- after stitching together a Jerry Lee Lewis documentary -- has moved on to making a "lesbian B-movie trilogy" with his wife, the writer and longtime Coen brothers editor Tricia Cooke, who is herself queer (her husband is straight).

The first fruit of this enterprising creative union was last year's "Drive-Away Dolls" (originally intended to be titled "Drive-Away Dykes"), a lesbian road movie distinguished by its hyper-likeable stars, Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, and by its photography, but not by much else (the story was so vaporous it all but wafted off the screen).

Now Qualley is back, playing the lesbian P.I. in Coen and Cooke's gumshoe tribute "Honey Don't!" Like the previous movie, this one is weak in narrative drive. It feels like the plot is convoluted only because that's how classic noir plots are supposed to be. (Back in the 1940s, when the filmmakers adapting the Raymond Chandler novel "The Big Sleep" found themselves flummoxed by the book's knotty plot and approached the writer for enlightenment, Chandler famously told them he couldn't figure it out himself.)

On the upside, the new movie, set in sun-parched Bakersfield, California, looks great (Ari Wegner is once again behind the camera). And Qualley and Chris Evans, who plays a flamingly heterosexual desert evangelist called Reverend Drew, energize the story whenever they're able to grab its reins. ("Do you drink?" Reverend Drew asks Honey. "Heavily," she says. "It's a point of pride.") It gets underway with Honey investigating a car crash that has left a woman driver dead. We see that the driver is wearing a ring with a distinctive sigil on it; we see a pair of hands reaching in to remove it. Then, not long after, we see the same sigil on a highway billboard noting the nearness of Evans' church.

The story sprawls out to take in the trailer park where Honey's sister (Kristen Connolly) lives, then follows the dangerous adventures of her niece (Talia Ryder) and her very estranged dad (Kale Browne). In a barroom we hear the piano player telling Honey she's giving up drinking and dating men. (We already know how Honey feels about men: "I'm not a pervert," she says.) There are some thugs on hand, too, wielding hammers and guns and knives. And there's a funny fingerbang scene with Honey and MG (a subdued Aubrey Plaza) that typifies the movie's perspective on lesbian sex as an unremarkable locus of affection and ... maybe something else as well.

The picture is more successful at normalizing its queer elements than in recapturing the shadowy allure of the old B's to which it seeks to pay homage. Unfortunately, it also manages a feat that no one was asking for -- it somehow makes a compact 88-minute runtime feel a little too long anyway.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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