Baby Dri­ver

Ped­al firm­ly pressed to the met­al, Edgar Wright’s absurd­ly enjoy­able thriller Baby Dri­ver bursts out of the garage with tires squeal­ing, radio cranked to max­i­mum vol­ume and guns blaz­ing. After tack­ling an alien inva­sion with 2013’s The World’s End and get­ting him­self pulled off of Marvel’s super­hero fac­to­ry floor, genre savant Wright has piv­ot­ed to a high-octane car caper in the tra­di­tion of Dri­ve, which is to say in the tra­di­tion of Wal­ter Hill’s The Dri­ver, which is to say in the tra­di­tion of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï.

But even though com­plic­it crim­i­nal Baby (EDM wun­derkind Ansel Elgo­rt, sud­den­ly a bona fide movie star) fan­cies him­self a moral iso­la­tion­ist like scor­pi­on-jack­et­ed Gosling before him, he’s any­thing but a copy of a copy of a copy. He stands apart by direct­ly embody­ing Wright’s exu­ber­ant cre­ative vision, the ulti­mate nego­ti­a­tion of the music video and nar­ra­tive cin­e­ma forms. And as a pop-cul­ture mag­pie bound to a world he escapes by reimag­in­ing it as pure enter­tain­ment, he might just embody Wright him­self as well.

Nev­er with­out the rota­tion of iPods he uses to drown out the whine of his tin­ni­tus (a sou­venir from the boy­hood car crash that claimed his par­ents’ lives, a lead-foot­ed sym­bol), Baby moves through his life like a musi­cal – if that musi­cal was Jacques Demy’s The Fast and the Furi­ous: Tokyo Drift. Round­ing curves right in time with a plat­inum-plat­ed sound­track, Baby stands in as an instru­ment with which Wright can con­vert some­thing as sim­ple as a walk down the street or as com­plex as a three-phase chase scene into an elab­o­rate pro­duc­tion number.

The film joins Baby just as he’s fin­ished pay­ing off a year-long debt to a no-non­sense drug baron (Kevin Spacey, improb­a­bly but won­der­ful­ly), his head swim­ming with ​’70s funk hits and dreams of run­ning away with his wait­ress girl­friend Deb­o­rah (Lily James).

Going straight proves more com­pli­cat­ed than they could’ve antic­i­pat­ed, and what begins as a car­sploita­tion thriller grad­u­al­ly skids into a Manichaean show­down between our man and an array of psy­cho­path­ic crooks includ­ing a demon­ic Jon Hamm and a pow­der-keg Jamie Foxx. There’s a bit of grind­ing as the film shifts gears, but the piti­less drag-down bru­tal­i­ty of the pro­tract­ed cli­max most­ly com­pen­sates for any feel­ing of lopsidedness.

It’s a vis­cer­al priv­i­lege to join Wright as he rev­els in the sheer bliss of screen kineti­cism, with Baby’s slight­ly pat grief nar­ra­tive a tol­er­a­ble respite for breath-catch­ing between rol­lick­ing dis­plays of tech­ni­cal fire­pow­er. And true to form, Wright shoe­horns in enough amus­ing visu­al curlicues and pop ephemera in-jokes (a Paul Williams cameo here, a Buster Keaton-cal­iber phys­i­cal sight gag there) to delight the cult that sprang up around his right­ly vaunt­ed Three Flavours Cor­net­to trilogy.

But even as Wright out­lines the ther­a­peu­tic pow­ers and devel­op­men­tal lim­its of eso­ter­i­ca obses­sion, the film’s chief plea­sures remain imme­di­ate, gen­er­ous and over­flow­ing. We’re blessed to be along for the ride.