Directed by Edgar Wright (2017)
by Sandy DeVito

It's fitting that in the opening moments of Edgar Wright's Baby Driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort) mocks playing at violin during the symphonic break-down of The Bellbottoms' track by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion; in many ways this is Wright's own mock symphony. More so even than any of his other films, all of which rely heavily on music to tell their stories (from the iconic Don't Stop Me Now zombie fight in Shaun of the Dead to the opening performance by Sex Bob-omb in Scott Pilgrim to Sisters of Mercy's Corrosion leading us out of the apocalypse and into the credits in The World's End), for this film, music is the story; it is the three acts and all of the bits in between. The dialogue is made into music with Baby's DJ tapes, characters speak in song lyrics, Baby never takes off his earbuds if he can help it, there's even a scene where he insists on starting a song over again before a bank heist, to the confusion of the con-men in the car with him. There's irony in his foster dad being deaf, but even that relationship, as Wright so deftly displays, has its music, albeit a kind you can't hear with the naked ear; that music is an ephemeral one, pure in timbre, floating in the air around them without noise. Love is music, maybe the purest kind of music there is, and if Baby Driver has one unifying theme, that's it, baby.