“Pull that out! That is not a public receptacle!”

Story: Jamie and Marian are BFFs, living their best lesbian life in 1999. Well okay, so apparently Marian needs to lighten up. But when Marian decides to drive down to Tallahassee and visit her Aunt? Jamie sees this as an opportunity to loosen up her friend. So they hop in the Corolla Marian scored as a driveaway, and hit the road. Maybe don’t check the trunk though… Oops. Too late.

Genre I’d put it in: Retro Road Trip Romance
Release Date: 2024
Remake, Sequel, Based-On, or Original: Wholly original!

Gotta say: Dolls is a Goofy Cohen movie. In the truest sense of the descriptive I just made up. It’s got that crazy Cohen aesthetic, ala Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Over-the-top characters, non-sequitur dialogue/situations, music you haven’t heard since you can’t remember when, and a strange but satisfying happy ending. Oh, and it’s super gay. Like, so totally gay. Kristen Stewart’s Rolling Stone covershoot gay. Towing your U-Haul to the Home Depot with your Subaru Outback gay. And it’s freakin’ awesome.

This film walks the line between fun camp and cringe camp with ease, by situating our Sapphic leads dead center in the midst of a whole lot of wild chaos. That Jamie and Marian are lesbians is just like saying they’re both twenty-somethings. It might play into the types of shenanigans they find themselves in, but it’s not the point of fact this story hangs its hat on. Jamie (the fun one) and Marian (the stodgy one) have been friends for years, and their Abbot and Costello vibe is a perfect fit for a story about how people react to strange goings-on. As Jamie jumps into scenarios – or outright causes them – Marian tries to rein in her BFF, vainly trying to keep to their driveaway company’s schedule. Well, let’s just say they’re absolutely gonna lose their security deposit. Watching these two get into, and out of, each scene is is the gist of Dolls, as it is with Cohen’s Thou.

And as with Thou? Jamie has an otherworldly “Southern by way of overenunciation” twang that had me thinking of George Clooney’s Ulysses Everett McGill. Jamie is sure of herself, and will tolerate no other ways of thinking…much to Marian’s chagrin. Jamie is unapologetically queer, talking to random motel clerks, restaurant types, and others, about the best spots for lesbians in any given area. It’s nice that Dolls is set in 1999, before Florida went absolutely batshit, and what’s-his-name was Governor of being a horrible human being. The kind of stuff Jamie breezily says and does would be dangerous nowadays, though there is a hint of that hatred when the duo pass a “family values”-type billboard, and Jamie deadpans “Lez-beeeen, don’t let the sun go down on you heeeeere.” Jamie tries to be cheeky, but they both understand how things could go bad very quickly if they were in an…unwelcoming area.

As Jamie and Marian, Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan give believable BFFs. Qualley is a vision as the kind of 90s lesbian your Ani DiFranco-loving aunt would have drooled over back in the day. And Viswanathan’s Marian is buttoned up because she’s a sweet, soft-hearted person who got hurt once to often, and doesn’t seem to want to try again. Naturally, the rom-com portion of this film gives us hints of the ol’ “maybe the real girlfriend is the friends we made along the way”, and these two actresses make the shift sweetly believable. Special shout-out to Beanie Feldstein as Jamie’s ex Sukie, a cop who’s tailing the duo thanks to The Bad Guys getting her contact info from the driveaway company. Feldstein knows exactly what she’s signed up for, and chews the scenery with delightful gusto.

Are there some hiccups? Sure. There are a few trippy psychedelic scenes whenever the camera focuses on the trunk of the Corolla, and the first two come out of nowhere. The suitcase in the trunk is a bit of a MacGuffin/Checkov’s Suitcase, but these hints at what’s inside feel a bit too obtuse. Though seeing [SPOILER] as part of the mind-trip is a delightful surprise during the final bit. And hello – what happened to the puppy, Alice B. Toklas? Sukie goes to Tallahassee to dump Alice onto Jamie, but as things wrap, there’s no sign of the wee doggo. Don’t stay through the credits; I did, and there’s no revelation. Just fun music.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know if this movie’s one for you. If you think it isn’t? That’d be a shame; Dolls harkens back to the fun road-trip films of the 80s and 90s, injecting a queer sensibility that makes for an even more realistic story. Even with the acid-trips, mysterious suitcases, and silly but savage bad guys.

#Protip: While the lesbian bars in Dolls are styled to be as authentic as possible, they’re based on ones co-writer Tricia Cooke used to frequent in the 1990s. Maybe that’s why they feel so real. Bravo, girl.