Where Drive Away Dolls was set in 1999 across the South, Coen and Clarke here transpose their project to Bakersfield, California, in the present day. We know it’s the present because, in an early scene, a character played by Billy Eichner spends too long wiping down the chair opposite Honey in the office of her private practice. “Covid,” he says. This is the entire joke. Eichner’s neurotic character is there to enlist Honey in learning the details of his boyfriend’s affair. Honey tells him that she doesn’t want to take on the case—she speaks in tortured, too-cute maxims about how those who seek her services in these cases already know the answers they claim to need, then begrudgingly agrees to provide all the details she can shake loose.

When I briefly worked for an environmental nonprofit in Los Angeles, the lawyers there used “Bakersfield” as shorthand for ecological decay the way others use “Washington” for corruption. It’s the ninth-largest city in California and the center of Kern County, which produces roughly two-thirds of the state’s oil; there is no coast in sight, just the Sierra Nevadas to the East and oil pumps dotting stretches of otherwise empty desert. The things that give Bakersfield its eerie end-of-history gloom should also make it the ideal neo-noir setting: a collision of old, intergenerational neuroses from within and constantly mutating dread from the world outside, the sense that capital has frozen a place in time.

Yet it’s difficult to watch Honey Don’t! without the nagging suspicion that fundamental questions about its world had simply never come up in the writing process. While the way Honey speaks is not modern (or Californian), it’s neither strange enough to be commented on by anyone—including her sister, who speaks as if someone is triggering an MPC pre-loaded with “beleaguered mom” stock dialogue—or part of a broader stylization. No one seems as if they’re from anywhere except: the movies, but they’re all different movies. This could be fun if it seemed to have any interest in being so.

And still, the writing is somehow more competent than the direction. It becomes genuinely difficult to watch Chris Evans flail his way through a performance as the sex-obsessed leader of a Christian cult. In Ethan’s work with his brother Joel, the villains, zany and bombastic though they may be, are specific, finely calibrated; Reverend Drew, on the other hand, is a clot of first-thought satire ported over from open mics during the Obama years. Even worse is the date scene with Honey and MG, where, from line to line, shot to reverse shot, the actors seem unclear on whether they’re playing a first date or a long-simmering affair. It’s the former, but we need a labored literalization in order to follow.