It is not a prerequisite of filmmaking to be indebted to your own lore, as much as audiences might will it to be. From the outside looking in, the notion of Ethan Coen making his solo directorial debut, 30 years after co-authoring Blood Simple and introducing the world to the singular cinematic paradigm of the Coen brothers, has an inescapable heft. Burdening a movie with expectation and meaning before seeing the finished product is the prerogative of any filmgoing audience, as unavoidable to some as it is optional to others. You can’t fault dreamers for dreaming, nor Drive-Away Dolls from being so thoroughly disinterested in the expectations of over-eager cinephiles everywhere. Film discourse and marketing schemes would position it as an event; its creators see it as a lark.

The backstory of Drive-Away Dolls, aggressively bandied about in the run-up to the film’s release, is a worthy entrant into the Coens’ grand history of red herrings. The reported two decades of production startups and shutdowns isn’t disingenuous so much as charmingly misleading, a trojan horse set on bombarding a highbrow audience with a good time at the flicks. Said reverie comes in the form of your standard caper comedy, this one concerning a pair of queer women played by Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan who unwittingly find themselves on the run after mistakenly coming into possession of an all-important briefcase MacGuffin.

Important might be a strong word, and Drive-Away Dolls finds much of its charm in side-stepping anything resembling throat-clearing grandiosity. Clocking in at a breezy 84 minutes, the movie’s greatest innovation isn’t so much the identity of its leads as the nonchalance with which it relays their worldview. The voracious sexual appetite of Qualley’s character is delightfully unfettered, and the leering male supporting characters are treated more as oblivious irritants than threatening monsters. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of the movie’s twenty-year journey to the big screen that its unvarnished frankness is no longer boundary pushing, with movies like Bottoms, Bros, and Bodies Bodies Bodies beating it to the irreverent punch, but this isn’t a zero sum game. After a century of hetero-normalcy at the movies, wherein queer stories were largely viewed through the lens of tragedy, it’s only right that course correcting should be done in waves.

While the movie at large makes a point of not shedding a drop of sweat, the same cannot be said for Qualley, who dials up the southern charm to the point of frenzy. It serves as an interesting counterbalance to the rest of the devil-may-care attitude on display, but will likely prove a breaking point for some viewers. The Casual Friday memo that clearly got passed around by the likes of Pedro Pascal, Bill Camp, and Colman Domingo seems to have escaped her desk, but being asked to channel Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona could bring out the manic energy in the best of us.

Invoking H.I. McDunnough is only one of Drive-Away Doll’s many callbacks to Coen brothers’ classics, though the stew of small-time crooks, ill-formed schemes and political weariness takes on a different flavor with Tricia Cooke as sous chef. Reportedly operating as an unofficial co-director, Ethan’s wife and collaborator is credited as the script’s original author, and her pen is decidedly less obfuscating than that of her partner. Gone are is the murky undertow of ostensible straight comedies like Burn After Reading and Hail! Caesar, replaced by a zany directness best witnessed in the film’s wacky editing style and lo-fi psychedelic interludes. It’s a curious twist of fate that her passion project also presents a safe space for her husband to stop taking things so seriously.

Exactly how serious the Coens are is never far from the center of any discussion around their filmography, and Drive-Away Dolls serves as a fascinating counterpoint to The Tragedy of MacBeth. Commonly known as the more technically-minded of the two, Joel used his solitary debut to adapt Shakespeare through the visual language of German Expressionism, and the result was exactly as fun as it sounds. Holding the two movies side by side makes for easy extrapolation, but assigning readily distinguishable roles to the duo from afar is the exact kind of self-satisfying projection that made both flicks unlikely to please in the first place. No matter the exact nature of their alchemy, filmdom is weakened by their fracture. Joel and Ethan need each other, but so long as they remain split, here’s hoping they can tune out the noise. The latter seems to be there already.