Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive runs 100 minutes and mostly holds its nerve. Ryan Gosling plays a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a wheelman for hire. He has no name — just the job. The film is a crime drama, and its calm is the whole point.
Trailer, via Icon Film Distribution.
Ryan Gosling and the Man With No Name
By day Driver crashes cars on cue. By night he drives criminals away from their work. Both jobs run through Shannon, the auto shop owner played by Bryan Cranston, who books the gigs and takes a cut. Gosling’s face does most of the acting here. He says little, and when he does speak it lands hard. The performance is a stunt of its own: stillness that reads as menace, then sudden violence when the mask slips.
Carey Mulligan, Benicio, and the Neighbor Upstairs
The film slows down when Driver meets Irene, his neighbor, played by Carey Mulligan, and her young son Benicio, played by Kaden Leos. Refn lets these scenes breathe. A drive to the store, a shared look, a boy in the back seat — the movie earns its quiet. Drive was the first film Mulligan signed to do after her Academy Award nomination for An Education, and she gives Irene a warmth the rest of the film lacks.
Then Standard, Irene’s husband, comes home from prison. Oscar Isaac plays him with a jittery desperation that makes his fate feel inevitable.
The Heist That Goes Wrong
Standard owes protection money to a gangster named Cook, who forces him to rob a pawn shop for $40,000. Driver offers to wheel the job. It falls apart:
- Standard is shot dead by the store owner.
- Blanche, Cook’s accomplice, exits with the bag of money.
- A second car gives chase through the parking lot.
- Driver shakes it and hides at a motel.
At the motel, Driver forces Blanche to talk. She admits she and Cook planned to steal the money for themselves, and that the bag holds $1 million — not the $40,000 Standard owed. Two gunmen find the room and kill Blanche. Driver kills them both.
Albert Brooks and the Mob Money
The money traces back to Nino, played by Ron Perlman, and his partner Bernie Rose, played by Albert Brooks. Brooks is the best thing in Drive. He plays a mobster who talks like a businessman and kills like one too. Bernie’s calm is more frightening than any shouting. The film’s tagline promises no clean getaways, and Bernie proves it.
What Drive Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t
Drive is a genre film with an art-house pulse. The chase scenes are lean, the violence is sudden. Refn won Best Director at the 64th Cannes Film Festival for it, and that prize makes sense: this is a director’s film more than a writer’s.
Where it stumbles is in the middle. The romance between Driver and Irene is sketched rather than built, and the film leans on Gosling’s silence to cover ground it hasn’t earned. Christina Hendricks gets a small role as Blanche and barely gets to use it. The heist mechanics are tight, but the emotional stakes stay thin.
Still, Drive knows exactly what it is. It’s a 100-minute crime thriller that trusts its audience to read a face instead of a speech. That’s rare.
7.9/10 on Metacritic (79/100)
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