Ryan Gosling, a satin scorpion jacket, and the most-imitated Los Angeles film of the 2010s.
An unnamed Los Angeles stunt driver works days at a garage owned by Shannon and nights as a getaway driver for hire. He meets Irene, a young mother whose husband is in prison. They form a tentative connection. When the husband returns and needs to do a job to clear a prison debt, the driver agrees to help. The job goes wrong. The driver spends the rest of the film slowly, methodically eliminating the criminal infrastructure that now threatens Irene and her son.
The film's pace is unusual. The driving is largely real. The dialogue is minimal. The pop-synth score by Cliff Martinez and the curated soundtrack — Kavinsky's Nightcall, Desire's Under Your Spell, College's A Real Hero — became, more or less single-handedly, the foundational sound of the synthwave revival that dominated the 2010s.
Nicolas Winding Refn, a Danish director who had made his name with the Pusher trilogy and Bronson, was directed to Drive after Hugh Jackman dropped out and Ryan Gosling personally requested Refn. The pairing produced one of the most-coherent stylistic statements of the 2010s. The film's pink cursive title font, the lingering close-ups on Gosling's face, the long held shots, the violence delivered in sudden compressed bursts — all of this became visual shorthand for 'Drive-style' filmmaking, which the next decade of crime cinema and synthwave music videos has been quoting since.
Refn won Best Director at Cannes 2011 for the film. Drive's commercial reception was uneven (a famous lawsuit was filed by a viewer who claimed the trailer's emphasis on car chases had misrepresented the film), but its cultural influence has, year by year, only grown.
Roughly two-thirds through the film, the Driver kisses Irene in an elevator before turning, when the elevator doors open and a hitman is revealed, and stomping the hitman to death on the elevator floor. The sequence runs about ninety seconds. The lights in the elevator drop to red at the moment of the kiss. The violence afterwards is unsoftened.
The scene is the film's structural pivot — the Driver has, until this moment, kept his violence offstage from Irene. After the elevator, she sees what he is. The film's tragedy is that he loves her enough that she is now in danger from him simply by association, and she has now seen enough of what he does that she cannot return to a romantic frame with him. The film closes on the Driver bleeding from a stomach wound, driving away into the night.
Drive is the film in which Gosling proved he could anchor a major release on screen presence alone. The Driver has perhaps thirty lines of dialogue in the entire film. The performance is built almost entirely from physical stillness, micro-shifts of expression, and the costume — the satin scorpion jacket has become one of the most-imitated wardrobe pieces in 21st-century cinema.
The role led directly to Gosling's subsequent run as a serious actor: The Place Beyond the Pines, Blade Runner 2049, La La Land, Barbie. Drive is the pivot of the second half of his career.