There's a hundred thousand streets in this city. You don't need to know the route. 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. I don't sit in while you're running it down. I don't carry a gun. I drive. This week we're behind the wheel of Drive (2011) — Nicolas Winding Refn's hypnotic, neon-drenched, brutally violent, achingly romantic neo-noir that arrived in 2011 and has spent every year since cementing its reputation as one of the defining films of the 21st century. The scorpion jacket. The toothpick. The elevator. The silence. We're going all the way in.
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn from a screenplay by Hossein Amini based on James Sallis's 2005 novel, the film follows an unnamed Hollywood stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals — a man of extraordinary skill and almost no words who quietly falls for his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) before a catastrophically botched heist pulls him into the orbit of Los Angeles mob figures Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman), setting off a chain of events he cannot survive without becoming something he may not want to be. Bryan Cranston plays Shannon, his mechanic and only real friend. Oscar Isaac is Irene's ex-convict husband Standard. Christina Hendricks appears and disappears in a scene that changes everything.
We're going deep on all of it: Gosling signed on for the lead role with the unusual condition that he personally chose the director — a first in his career — and he chose Refn without hesitation, saying "It had to be him. There was no other choice." Refn then moved into a Los Angeles house, insisted the cast and screenwriter move in with him, and selected filming locations by having Gosling drive him around Los Angeles at night — a detail that somehow perfectly explains everything about what this film is. We're talking about Albert Brooks's shattering against-type performance as the quietly menacing Bernie Rose, Cliff Martinez's extraordinary synthesizer score, the film's radical economy of dialogue which Gosling and Refn stripped down further even from an already spare script, the elevator scene which stands as one of the most formally perfect sequences of the decade, and why this film — made for $15 million — became one of the most referenced and imitated films of the 2010s.
We're also asking the big questions: is Drive the definitive Ryan Gosling performance? Is Albert Brooks's Bernie Rose one of the great villains of 21st century cinema? And is the Driver one of the great silent movie heroes — a character who communicates almost entirely through presence, stillness, and sudden explosive violence?
Whether you're a Ryan Gosling fan, a Nicolas Winding Refn devotee, a neo-noir enthusiast, a lover of films where silence does more work than dialogue, an Albert Brooks admirer who never saw this side of him coming, a Carey Mulligan fan, a film score obsessive, someone whose entire personality was shaped by this film's aesthetic for approximately two years, or just a person who believes cinema at its coolest is cinema at its most powerful — this episode is essential.
Topics covered: Drive 2011 | Nicolas Winding Refn | Ryan Gosling | Carey Mulligan | Albert Brooks | Bryan Cranston | Oscar Isaac | scorpion jacket | elevator scene | best films 2011 | best neo-noir films | best action films 21st century | Cliff Martinez score | best film scores | literally me meme Ryan Gosling | silent protagonist films | Ryan Gosling best performances | Albert Brooks against type | Los Angeles nightlife films | best cinematography 2010s | Cannes Best Director award
Subscribe, rate, and leave us a review — and settle it: is Drive Ryan Gosling's greatest performance? And is the elevator scene the single greatest sequence in any film of the 2010s?
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