by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

Every once in a while, a movie comes out that redefines “cool.”  It seems to have a ripple effect on every time of pop culture in its wake, from other movies influenced by it, to music, to TV, to everything under the sun.  Think of the waves of parodies to follow movies like The Matrix or Pulp Fiction.  They had their own unique look down pat. 

In 2011, that movie was Drive.  The silent antihero.  The 80s synth-wave.  The slow-mo.  Drive was fucking iconic and we’re still feeling its effects to this day--Stranger Things, The Guest and every type of vaporwave owe Drive a huge debt of gratitude.

Drive is totally self-aware and knows how clever it is, but never devolves into a parody of movies that it lovingly homages.  If anything, its self-awareness is part of its overall earnestness.  Drive is a movie with heart.  The reason the movie is thrilling isn’t because of car chases, action or mayhem.  It’s thrilling because we care about what happens to the characters.  When the nameless Driver (played by Ryan Gosling) stomps a man’s head in, it’s not a “Whoa, cool!” moment.  It’s layered with tragedy, knowing that he will never see Irene (Carey Mulligan), the woman he loves, ever again.

Driver is a stunt driver for the movies by the day, and at night he’s a getaway driver for robberies.  His rules are simple: “You give me a time and a place, I give you a five minute window.  Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours.  No matter what.  Anything happens a minute either side of that and you're on your own.”  In the opening chase sequence (in a movie called Drive, I think it’s awesome that there are only two car chases), Driver, instead of punching the car like Bullitt and swerving through crowded streets, plays a game of cat and mouse with the police.  He accelerates to punch out his car to an advantage, waits in the shadows, listens to the police scanner, and keeps ahead of his pursuers by a couple steps psychologically.  And in a moment of too-coolness, he pulls the car into a crowded area, puts on a hat, takes off his jacket and blends in with the crowd.  Job done.

Irene is his neighbor in an apartment complex you don’t normally see in the movies.  In the movies, if a character doesn’t have a lot of money, they still always live somewhere with a nice view and modern appliances.  The apartment complex in Drive is something realistically and quintessentially LA.  It looks lived in.  It looks real.  Drive is to LA as Star Wars is to its own fantastical sci-fi universe.  

When Driver meets Irene, they have an instant attraction.  He falls for her, but she has one problem: A husband named Standard (Oscar Isaac, who continues to be one of the best living actors today) due out of prison.  Driver agrees to help Standard with some problems he’s having, with gangsters who say he owes them money.  Driver arranges a means of pulling off a heist, a one last heist, to get the gangsters the money that they say is owed to them, and then after that, the agreement is that they leave Standard, and his family, alone for good.  There’s internal strife between organized crime between Bernie (Ron Perlman) and Nino (Albert Brooks) and the “family” back home.  Driver unwittingly gets in the middle of it and becomes a complication that would be better off erased.

Drive remains Winding Refn’s most accessible movie, while still rife with his directorial trademarks and flourishes he’s known for.  There are long, hallucinatory stretches of silence.  Apparently, huge swaths of dialogue were done away with when he signed on as director, taking a red pen to the script.  Refn loves to tell a story visually, to the point of obsession.  There’s an expression sometimes in writing that he seems to have taken to heart: Why tell it when you can show it?  

As focused on visuals as it may be, Drive actually seems to be having fun with the actors and performances, watching someone like Bryan Cranston as Driver’s good friend and mentor Shannon limp around, chain smoke and espouse life lessons in a gravelly voice.  The ensemble cast of Drive is amazing.  Christina Hendricks shows up in a bit role to help with the heist to get Standard out of trouble.  Albert Brooks plays against type as a sympathetic villain.  Ron Perlman plays Ron Perlman, beautifully so. 

Drive is one of those “love it or hate it” movies.  If you’re expecting it to be a movie in the tradition of the Fast and the Furious series, only more serious, and with Ryan Gosling as the lead, you’re probably going to be incredibly disappointed.  If you go in to the movie knowing that it’s going to be an offbeat, show-offy work from a European director and is less concerned with cars and more of a contemplation on violence, you’ll have a better idea of what to expect.