Why Baby Dri­ver is the movie musi­cal we’ve been wait­ing for

Edgar Wright is yet to give a straight answer when asked if he con­sid­ers his new film, Baby Dri­ver, to be a musi­cal, offer­ing only ​“sort of,” ​“kind of,” ​“in a way” – so seam­less is the writer/director’s inte­gra­tion of the sound­track into the fibre of the film​’s action sequences. Wright should give him­self more cred­it. He’s not mak­ing a movie musi­cal so much as redefin­ing its pos­si­bil­i­ties, mov­ing audi­ences away from the cen­tu­ry-old notion of what con­sti­tutes a musi­cal, lead­ing all the way back to the dawn of the talkies.

In Baby Dri­ver, Wright takes the musi­cal genre into more per­son­al ter­rain. He achieves this rad­i­cal rein­ven­tion by pump­ing the tunes through white Apple head­phones instead of open­ing the music out to the entire world of the film. Head­phones are cen­tral to under­stand­ing the chang­ing rela­tion­ship between soci­ety and music. As devel­oped nations found more time for leisure, the sheet music indus­try boomed, cre­at­ing what we now recog­nise as pop music. Groups gath­ered around the piano, their active par­tic­i­pa­tion a nec­es­sary com­po­nent of music cre­ation. Even tech­no­log­i­cal advances like the record play­er and radio, which put music cre­ation in the hands of pro­fes­sion­als, were designed to trans­mit sound to a sin­gle room. It makes sense that the musi­cal as we still think of it today arose from this era. The hall­marks – col­lec­tive singing, chore­o­graphed dance – are in keep­ing with a time when music was a com­mu­nal activity.

A series of inno­va­tions over the past 50 years have rup­tured that rela­tion­ship and, in turn, rel­e­gat­ed the musi­cal genre to a nos­tal­gic rel­ic. The most cru­cial is the rise of the tran­sis­tor radio and its accom­pa­ny­ing head­phones, which moved music into a per­son­al space for the first time. It became some­thing pri­vate and increas­ing­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of indi­vid­ual tastes. Sud­den­ly songs could be bro­ken down into their ele­ment com­po­nents and remixed at will. As The Atlantic point­ed out in a lament over the decline of com­mu­nal singing in Amer­i­ca, we wouldn’t even know what to sing togeth­er. The idea of bod­ies and voic­es mov­ing in syn­chro­nised sound and motion feels quaint.

Through the tunes that course through the ears of Ansel Elgort’s sto­ic get­away dri­ver, Wright push­es the musi­cal to its fur­thest point from that pre­vi­ous mod­el. Baby’s mas­tery over music helps him pull off some clean escapes in a field dom­i­nat­ed by slop­pi­ness and impro­vi­sa­tion. We hear the juke­box sound­track as he hears it, through in-ear head­phones con­nect­ed to an iPod, even down to the sound mix where each speak­er cor­re­sponds to one of Baby’s ears. The device sep­a­rates his audi­to­ry expe­ri­ence from that of his part­ners, sub­merg­ing us into an aur­al land­scape he metic­u­lous­ly controls.

Baby knows each beat and times it to cor­re­spond with the stages of the heist. Dur­ing one rob­bery, he even rewinds the track to reset his head­space to the prop­er posi­tion. Wright, ever the con­sum­mate styl­ist, syncs up the images and sounds of Baby Dri­ver to move along with Baby’s son­ic voy­age. This is not just some flour­ish to jus­ti­fy his pre­cise­ly staged action scenes; the music serves both a prac­ti­cal pur­pose (music helps drown out the hum of Baby’s tin­ni­tus) and an emo­tion­al one.

Baby Dri­ver is not sim­ply a glo­ri­fied music video. The songs pow­er the film, and because Wright wrote his script in time with the music fea­tured in each scene, they are part of its very DNA. Baby’s skil­ful elud­ing of the police and oth­er vehi­cles make for the kind of height­ened crescen­dos we’re used to see­ing in movie musi­cals. But these moments occur sole­ly in Baby’s head – the rest of the world is shut out, left to mar­vel but not par­tic­i­pate in them. (It’s no coin­ci­dence that the one rob­bery where music does play through the car speak­ers does not unfold as planned.)

While the road is nor­mal­ly the stage of choice for Baby’s strut­ting, Wright also allows for moments explor­ing music’s role beyond enabling his cra­zi­est auto­mo­tive exploits. In the film’s open­ing cred­its sequence, Baby strolls to get cof­fee for the gang while pip­ing Bob & Earl’s ​‘Harlem Shuf­fle’ into his ears. Every chore­o­graphed step match­es up with a spot on the side­walk bear­ing a word which cor­re­sponds to the phrase in the song, a vision of music not as ampli­fied real­i­ty but rather an escape mech­a­nism for his mun­dane routine.

Baby also proves to be a musi­cian in his own right as a remix artist. Though privy to the pre-heist plan­ning meet­ings, he is a pas­sive par­tic­i­pant in them, expect­ed to take in all the infor­ma­tion with­out ask­ing ques­tions. Sur­rep­ti­tious­ly, though, he’s record­ing the pro­ceed­ings and turn­ing their phras­es into hooks for mix­tapes. By reclaim­ing their words as music, Baby regains the agency he osten­sive­ly lacks in these sit­u­a­tions. Whether behind the wheel or a turntable, he’s always most com­fort­able when giv­en con­trol over music.

“I find it fun­ny that musi­cals are con­sid­ered a guilty plea­sure by some film fans and dis­missed out­right by oth­ers,” Wright wrote in 2010. ​“It seems a shame that so many film fans write off the genre as Broad­way camp as there are so many musi­cals stretch­ing back over 80 years that define cin­e­ma in its purest form.” In style and tone there is lit­tle sim­i­lar­i­ty between Baby Dri­ver and clas­sic Hol­ly­wood musi­cals. In mood and func­tion, how­ev­er, Wright finds an ana­logue for the mil­len­ni­al gen­er­a­tion. Our musi­cal moments no longer resem­ble a Broad­way show­stop­per – they look more like the orig­i­nal com­mer­cials on which Apple sold their iPod to the mass­es, and Wright bases a thrilling nar­ra­tive around them.