Drive starts off as a leisurely cruise, revs into a car chase and ends in a fiery, mangled wreck. That may sound like bad news – but it’s only a bumpy road for the characters involved. For the audience, it’s a fantastic excuse for rubbernecking.

The film – about a nameless Hollywood stunt driver slash getaway driver-for-hire who gets into something real bad – is not an easy movie to peg down. It combines genres and eras into a stylized creation all its own. It starts off calm, then gets crazy. It’s loving, then it’s violent. It’s a noir, a gangster movie, a car-chase action flick and a romance all rolled into one. It’s decidedly 80s-influenced, in the music and the feel, even though it’s set in present-day Los Angeles. But most importantly, it’s just plain good.

The first part of the film revels in silence. Director Nicholas Winding Refn isn’t afraid to use pauses, switch to slow-motion, hold stares, let moments pass without words. It’s during these quiet times that Driver (Ryan Gosling, delivering the goods) meets a sweet-faced young mother named Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives down the hall from him. The two share a wordless connection that remains even after Irene tells him she’s got a husband (Oscar Isaac) in prison.

It’s when said husband gets out that things start to get louder. Even though Standard’s out of prison, he’s still in deep. He has some dangerous debts that need to be paid and Driver agrees to play getaway driver while Standard robs a pawn shop. Needless to say, the heist goes very, very wrong. After that, things veer into violent, almost Tarantino-esque territory as Driver tries to back out of the mess – which happens to involve some ruthless gangsters – while keeping Irene and her son safe.

Gosling channels a young Marlon Brando as the hard-to-read loner without a name (or at least one that never gets mentioned on film). Equipped with few lines but plenty of expression, Gosling builds his character into an unconventional hero. Even his satin scorpion bomber jacket takes on an iconic status by the end (like Brando’s snakeskin jacket The Fugitive Kind, or James Dean’s red one in Rebel Without a Cause). And yet he’s able to maintain his character’s mystery. What’s his name? Where did he come from? Where is he going? We’re left to wonder what he’s hiding under the hood.

The “bad guys” are terrifying – each in their own way. There’s Nino (Ron Perlman), who cuts an imposing, brutish figure from the start, and Bernie (Albert Brooks), the more understated – yet equally as dangerous – cold-blooded criminal. And it’s a delight to see Mad Men?’s Christina Hendricks in trashy, bad girl mode, as she plays a brief but memorable role in the initial heist-gone-wrong. Bryan Cranston plays a crooked mechanic with

a good heart and a soft spot for Driver.

The violence is shockingly gory and disconcerting – and at times felt overdone. (Though the fact that Driver continues to wear his increasingly bloodied scorpion jacket is pretty is amusing.) But the car chases – thankfully – never go over-the-top. The suspense behind the wheel is always there, but it never delves into Fast and Furious territory. The movie’s cold open in particular shows Driver’s “play it cool” attitude chauffeuring two-bit crooks out of cops’ way. No fancy car flips or spins, just quick, calculated maneuvers.

No matter the pace, Drive is worth the ride. You’ll wanna call shotgun for this one.

Second Look Review:

Drive is one of those films that reminds me why I bother to go to the movies at all. In a dark theater, with a bunch of people I didn’t know and may not have had any idea what the film was going to be about, the movie plays better than anything I’ve seen this year. It evokes a level of emotional involvement that is truly surprising, particularly when given its fairly conventional and well-worn components. This is an old school movie, and the retro vibe gives it a timeless quality that should sustain its cult appeal for many years to come. Sometimes it’s obvious that you’re watching something special, and that’s what I got from Drive.

To go through the plot of Drive is to reduce what is at its most powerful a purely surprising experience. I even managed to avoid trailers and clips before my screening, and in this particular case, I can say that I made the right choice. In light of that, I will only reveal a few small facts that are important to understanding why you might want to see the movie, and facts which are revealed within the first fifteen or so minutes anyway and are hence relatively spoiler free. Ryan Gosling plays a stunt car driver for movies who also moonlights as a getaway driver for hire. He works at a garage run by Bryan Cranston who has a great dramatic turn here as part time mechanic, part time surrogate father figure. Gosling meets his neighbor, Carey Mulligan, and her young son, and from there on out, the film never takes its foot off the accelerator or relaxes its ever-tightening grip on your throat. This is some pretty powerful stuff, and it’s because the characters are so well crafted and push the story in such believable and emotionally charged ways. There’s a beautiful simplicity to the whole exercise, without a misplaced line or an unnecessary scene to be found.

Musically, Drive uses an eclectic mix of electronic instruments and a euro-synth flavor that perfectly compliments

the feel of the images. The thumping soundtrack makes every shot resonate in a different way, causing some sequences of the lead character just driving around to play like a classic music video. It’s actually hard to describe the sensation you get from some of the moments of perfect audio and visual synchronization. A static shot will drift to one side with a swell, and you’ll find yourself wondering how the filmmaker knew that’s what the music was inspiring in the viewer, until you remember how carefully designed and orchestrated the whole thing is. A lot of Hollywood productions are the result of cramped shooting schedules and shoehorned pre-production, ending up with a half-baked movie that never quite gels. There is no part of Drive that doesn’t belong, and that singularity of vision is exactly what you’d expect from the director behind Bronson and Valhalla Rising. I hope that with this film he will be well on his way towards the domestic recognition he deserves.

If you’re tempted to look up a detailed plot synopsis somewhere, I don’t blame you. All I can say is to trust the filmmaker to give you an experience worth the price of your admission, and go for it. I don’t recommend blind faith often, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that this film doesn’t deliver, and I couldn’t be more excited to drag my friends to it when it makes its theatrical debut. Believe me, you’ll be glad you got in the car.
Synopsis:
A Hollywood stuntman (Gosling) who moonlights as a get-away driver for the criminal underground finds himself on the run from after a botched job. Riding shotgun and equally in danger are his neighbor (Mulligan) and her child.