Honey O’Donahue’s clients are dropping like flies.

As played by Margaret Qualley, Honey is both private investigator and femme fatale, smooth and understated, a queer, 2025 version of the hard-boiled detective. She’s all click-clacking heels, black coffee and a Rolodex, despite owning an iPhone. That self-conscious goofiness underpins much of “Honey, Don’t!,” a darkly funny, conscientiously convoluted neo-noir.

Directed by Ethan Coen and written by Coen and Tricia Cooke, “Honey, Don’t!” is the second in the pair’s planned lesbian B-movie trilogy, which kicked off with 2024’s “Drive-Away Dolls.”

We open on a car crash, and a mysterious dame wrenching a ring off the finger of a dead woman. Honey doesn’t buy the traffic fatality explanation, so she starts pulling threads leading to a corrupt church, a drug ring, an estranged father, a missing niece, some strange deaths and some colorful characters to spice things up.

There’s Aubrey Plaza as MG Falcone, a gruff local cop with whom Honey embarks on a very horny affair. Charlie Day is a charming, gormless cop who won’t stop hitting on Honey no matter how many times she tells him she likes girls. Billy Eichner makes a short but satisfying appearance as a client who thinks his boyfriend is cheating.

The most colorful of them all is Chris Evans as Reverend Drew, the leader of the local Four-Way Temple who preaches using a headset his space does not require, deals drugs for a mysterious outfit known as “The French” and has extravagant amounts of sex with members of his flock while saying things like “yes, you are the light.”

Evans goes for broke as Reverend Drew, which is a lot of fun but ultimately lands on caricature more than character. Qualley’s marvelous performance as the conflicted, courageous Honey carries the day, curious to a fault but snowed by sexual desire, like so many good PIs before her.

Don’t forget: This is meant to be a B movie, more stylized fun than prestige filmmaking, and by and large that’s what it is. In many scenes Honey is shot starting at her shoes, a repeated cliché intro shot of a woman in a noir. It’s silly.

“You didn’t go and get sober did you?” a bar piano player (Tony winner Lena Hall) asks Honey.

“I wouldn’t do that,” she replies, in her deep detective deadpan.

Good, our pianist answers, because that could lead to awful things like sleeping with men and voting Republican.

“Honey Don’t!” exchanges the noir PI’s standard gritty, urban environment for the rundown, low-slung streets of Bakersfield, California, a sunbleached spot that’s straddling the line between the Central Valley and Southern California and, visually, between 1975 and 2025.

Beneath the usual noir signifiers — sex and cigarettes, grimy bars, bartenders with cleaning rags and cops with mustaches — “Honey Don’t!” also seems obsessed with prodding the lines between submission and aggression, perpetrator and victim, predator and prey. These dynamics cast long shadows, in families, religion and sexual relationships. How do those shadows shade our lives? Can one become the other?

It is not, however, obsessed with wrapping up what might be considered loose ends by modern standards. But that hardly seems accidental, and frankly, that’s fine with me. So many modern films seem worried about audiences feeling the slightest bit confused that they overexplain eh-vuh-ree-thing, which, for my money, is the more boring option of the two.

But even if the weave is loose and the big final reveal takes such a hard-left turn it could cause another traffic fatality, “Honey Don’t!” is a bleak and breezy good time. Don’t overthink it.

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‘HONEY DON’T!’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, some strong violence, and language)

Running time: 1:28

How to watch: In theaters Aug. 22

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