Automobiles, pop songs, and movies form a golden braid as eternal as the one that binds Gödel, Escher, and Bach. In 1980, the writer-director Paul Schrader released American Gigolo, whose first three minutes mostly feature shots of Richard Gere driving a black Mercedes convertible along the Pacific Coast Highway while Blondie’s “Call Me” plays on the soundtrack. There is something ineffably galvanizing about Gere’s whipping hair, the calm Pacific Ocean, the pulsating music, and the quick cuts to the spinning hubcap with the Mercedes logo on it—the whole scene puts the “motion” in “motion picture.” Even though the rest of the movie stinks, those opening minutes made American Gigolo a hit. And to this day, the only thing anyone remembers about it is the black Mercedes convertible.
Baby Driver, the surprise summer hit from the British writer and director Edgar Wright, is an exercise in style that doesn’t have an idea in its head. Instead, Baby Driver has guns. It has great songs. It has dancing. It has beautiful girls. It has beautiful guys. It has bank robberies. It has a cute couple who meet cute and remain cute. It has Kevin Spacey spitting out bons mots almost as fast as Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Most important, it has cars.
Spacey plays Doc, who organizes robberies in and around Atlanta. He brings in a different crew of thieves for each heist. But he always has a silent kid with an iPod and headphones behind the wheel of the getaway car. The kid is called Baby, and he’s played by the sweet-faced Ansel Elgort. The other crooks rag on Baby because he’s uncommunicative; it’s Wright’s amusing conceit that living in the world of the criminal is basically like being eternally in fourth grade, only the bullies have guns and gold teeth. Baby’s antagonists accuse him of being mentally challenged, but they can’t argue with his results. Baby essentially choreographs his vehicular escapes from Atlanta’s finest to synchronize with the music playing in his ears. The cars spin and whirl and leap as though they were in a dance competition.
Wright, who made his reputation with amusing and bloody comic genre mashups like Shaun of the Dead (a zombie picture) and Hot Fuzz (a buddy-cop movie), has thought through every frame of Baby Driver. Its sequences are shot and timed with astonishing precision, more like Busby Berkeley musical numbers from the 1930s than Michael Bay-style horror in which there is a cut every five seconds. You know where and in which direction Baby is driving at every moment. This means you know how he’s getting into trouble—essential information if you are to be delighted by how he avoids disaster time and again. This is action directing of a very high order.
Baby meets Debora (Lily James), a waitress at the diner where his mother worked before she was killed in a car crash during an argument with Baby’s abusive father. Wright wisely slows the action down so that we can see the two of them fall for each other in real time. They are both wide-eyed innocents hoping for an escape. Baby is the least hardened career criminal in history. It turns out Baby once hotwired and wrecked Doc’s car and is paying off an immense debt to the gangster, who has also threatened the life of Baby’s wheelchair-bound foster father. Even so, Doc admires and has avuncular feelings toward Baby; he explains to the hostile psychopathic robbers that Baby is afflicted with permanent ringing in his ears from that long-ago car crash. He can only drown out the maddening tinnitus by listening to music through his headphones.
Only one thing keeps Baby Driver from being a disreputable classic: Its villains are lousy. They’re played by Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm, and the two of them have very little edge. Hamm’s character spends the last third of the movie menacing Debora and threatening Baby’s life, but Hamm has no gift for intimidation. If you’re not frightened by an action picture’s villains, or angered by them, then you don’t want to see them dead. And if you don’t want to see them dead, then the movie that contains them just isn’t going to have the visceral oomph that can turn a beautifully crafted piece of work into pop-culture swill for the ages. Still, Baby Driver has those cars dancing to a buoyant soundtrack, and together they do deliver a terrific kick.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
