drive ryan gosling movie review

The existential getaway driver

The Driver drives for hire. He has no other name, and no other life. When we first see him, he’s the wheelman for a getaway car, who runs from police pursuit not only by using sheer speed and muscle, but by coolly exploiting the street terrain and outsmarting his pursuers. By day, he is a stunt driver for action movies. The two jobs represent no conflict for him: He drives.

As played by Ryan Gosling , he is in the tradition of two iconic heroes of the 1960s: Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name and Alain Delon in “ Le Samourai .” He has no family, no history and seemingly few emotions. Whatever happened to him drove any personality deep beneath the surface. He is an existential hero, I suppose, defined entirely by his behavior.

That would qualify him as the hero of a mindless action picture, all CGI and crashes and mayhem. “Drive” is more of an elegant exercise in style, and its emotions may be hidden but they run deep. Sometimes a movie will make a greater impact by not trying too hard. The enigma of the driver is surrounded by a rich gallery of supporting actors who are clear about their hopes and fears, and who have either reached an accommodation with the Driver, or not. Here is still another illustration of the old Hollywood noir principle that a movie lives its life not through its hero, but within its shadows.

The Driver lives somewhere (somehow that’s improbable, since we expect him to descend full-blown into the story). His neighbor is Irene, played by Carey Mulligan , that template of vulnerability. She has a young son, Benecio (Kaden Leos), who seems to stir the Driver’s affection, although he isn’t the effusive type. They grow warm, but in a week, her husband, Standard ( Oscar Isaac ), is released from prison. Against our expectations, Standard isn’t jealous or hostile about the new neighbor, but sizes him up, sees a professional and quickly pitches a $1 million heist idea. That will provide the engine for the rest of the story, and as Irene and Benecio are endangered, the Driver reveals deep feelings and loyalties indeed, and undergoes enormous risk at little necessary benefit to himself.

The film by the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (“ Bronson “), based on a novel by James Sallis , peoples its story with characters who bring lifetimes onto the screen, in contrast to the Driver, who brings as little as possible. Ron Perlman seems to be a big-time operator working out of a small-time front, a pizzeria in a strip mall. Albert Brooks , not the slightest bit funny, plays a producer of the kinds of B movies the Driver does stunt driving for — and also has a sideline in crime. These people are ruthless.

More benign is Bryan Cranston , as the kind of man you know the Driver must have behind him, a genius at auto repairs, restoration and supercharging.

I mentioned CGI earlier. “Drive” seems to have little of it. Most of the stunt driving looks real to me, with cars of weight and heft, rather than animated impossible fantasies. The entire film, in fact, seems much more real than the usual action-crime-chase concoctions we’ve grown tired of. Here is a movie with respect for writing, acting and craft. It has respect for knowledgable moviegoers. There were moments when I was reminded of “ Bullitt ,” which was so much better than the films it inspired. The key thing you want to feel, during a chase scene, is involvement in the purpose of the chase. You have to care. Too often we’re simply witnessing technology.

Maybe there was another reason I thought of “Bullitt.” Ryan Gosling is a charismatic actor, as Steve McQueen was. He embodies presence and sincerity. Ever since his chilling young Jewish neo-Nazi in “ The Believer ” (2001), he has shown a gift for finding arresting, powerful characters. An actor who can fall in love with a love doll and make us believe it, as he did in “ Lars and the Real Girl ” (2007), can achieve just about anything. “Drive” looks like one kind of movie in the ads, and it is that kind of movie. It is also a rebuke to most of the movies it looks like.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Carey Mulligan as Irene
• Oscar Isaac as Standard
• Bryan Cranston as Shannon
• Albert Brooks as Bernie
• Ryan Gosling as Driver
• Ron Perlman as Nino
• Hossein Amini

Based on the novel by

• James Sallis

Directed by

• Nicolas Winding Refn

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Movie Review | 'Drive'

Fasten Your Seat Belts, the Chevy Is Taking Off

• Share full article

By A. O. SCOTT

• Sept. 15, 2011

A long time ago, as a young filmmaker besotted with the hard-boiled pleasures of classic Hollywood, Jean-Luc Godard claimed that all anyone needed to make a film was a girl and a gun . In his new movie, “Drive,” Nicolas Winding Refn, in thrall to a later Hollywood tradition, tests out a slightly different formula. In this case all you need is a guy and a car.

In the brilliant opening sequence the formula seems to work beautifully. The car is, of all things, a late-model silver Chevy Impala, the kind of generic, functional ride you might rent at the airport on a business trip. The guy is Ryan Gosling — his character has no known proper name, and is variously referred to as “the driver,” “the kid” and “him” — and to watch him steer through Los Angeles at night is to watch a virtuoso at work. Behind the wheel of a getaway car after an uninteresting, irrelevant and almost botched robbery, the driver glides past obstacles and shakes off pursuers, slowing down as often as he accelerates and maintaining a steady pulse rate even as the soundtrack winds up the tension to heart attack levels.

The virtuosity on display is also the director’s, of course, and that, for better and for worse, is pretty much the point of “Drive,” the coolest movie around and therefore the latest proof that cool is never cool enough. Mr. Winding Refn is a Danish-born director (“Bronson,” “Valhalla Rising,” the “Pusher” trilogy), some of whose earlier films have inspired ardent, almost cultish devotion in cinephile circles.

His own love of movies can hardly be doubted, and there’s nothing wrong with his taste. He likes the stripped-down highway movies of the 1960s and ’70s — the kind that Quentin Tarantino celebrated in “Death Proof” — and also the atmospheric masculine melancholy associated with Michael Mann . You might also catch a hint of Paul Schrader’s “American Gigolo” and, with respect to the story rather than to the visual style, a whole bunch of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone westerns.

Mr. Gosling’s driver, like Mr. Eastwood’s Man With No Name , is a solitary figure with no background or connections but with skills that defy explanation. In addition to his getaway gigs, he drives stunt cars for movies — the source of a witty trompe l’oeil sequence early in the film — and might have a future on the racing circuit.

At least that’s what his friend and sometime employer Shannon (Bryan Cranston) thinks. He has a plan to persuade a couple of local gangsters (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks) to invest in a car that will be both Shannon’s and the driver’s ticket out of their marginal, sun-baked, film noir existence.

You don’t need me to tell you that the plan goes astray and that before too long the girl and the gun come into play, in more or less that order. The girl’s name is Irene, she is played by Carey Mulligan, and she lives with her young son down the hall from the driver. A neighborly flirtation is disrupted by the return from prison of Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), who gets pulled back into his old life of crime in such a way as to bring out the guns and require from the driver a few gruesomely violent acts of chivalry.

There is a bag full of money, a crosshatching of vendettas and betrayals, and an ambience of crepuscular Southern California anomie. There is also one scene of pure automotive pleasure, when the driver takes Irene and her son on a cruise along the kind of concrete culvert that has often been used for car chases in the past. But this is not “The Big Lebowski,” which took such delight in its status as pastiche that it ended up in a zone of wild originality and real feeling. “Drive” is somber, slick and earnest, and also a prisoner of its own emptiness, substituting moods for emotions and borrowed style for real audacity.

This is not to say that the movie is bad — as I have suggested, the skill and polish are hard to dispute — but rather that it is, for all its bravado, timid and conventional. In the hands of great filmmakers (like Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Godard, to stick with relevant examples) genre can be a bridge between familiar narrative structures and new insights about how people interact and behave. Those are precisely what “Drive” is missing, in spite of some intriguingly nuanced performances.

The softness of Mr. Gosling’s face and his curiously high-pitched, nasal voice make him an unusually sweet-seeming avenger, even when he is stomping bad guys into bloody pulp. And Ms. Mulligan’s whispery diction and kewpie-doll features have a similarly disarming effect. Irene seems like much too nice a person to be mixed up in such nasty business. Not that she’s really mixed up in it. Her innocence is axiomatic and part of the reason the driver goes to such messianic lengths to protect her.

To make the movie work on its own constricted terms, you need — beyond this girl and this guy, and the cars and the weapons — a colorful supporting cast. And this is what saves “Drive” from arch tedium: Mr. Cranston’s wheezing, anxious loser; Christina Hendricks’s seething, taciturn underworld professional; and above all Mr. Brooks’s diabolically nebbishy incarnation of corruption and venality.

In his self-authored comic roles, Mr. Brooks often exudes a passive-aggressive hostility, a latent capacity for violence held in check by neurosis and cowardice. He lets you assume the same in “Drive” until the moment he stabs someone in the eye with a fork. It’s a shocking and oddly glorious moment — something a lot of us, without quite knowing it or being able to explain just why, have been waiting 30 years to see.

“Drive” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Acts of gruesomely violent chivalry and vehicular aggression.

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn; written by Hossein Amini, based on the book by James Sallis; director of photography, Newton Thomas Sigel; edited by Matthew Newman; music by Cliff Martinez; production design by Beth Mickle; costumes by Erin Benach; produced by Marc Platt, Adam Siegel, John Palermo, Gigi Pritzker and Michel Litvak; released by FilmDistrict. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

WITH : Ryan Gosling (Driver), Carey Mulligan (Irene), Bryan Cranston (Shannon), Christina Hendricks (Blanche), Ron Perlman (Nino), Oscar Isaac (Standard) and Albert Brooks (Bernie Rose).

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Drive Reviews

Director Nicolas Winding Refn infuses an amalgam of several standard stories with an unassailable armor of cool to protect the indefatigable loneliness at its center.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 26, 2024

Drive is basically the coolest movie ever. Its dreamlike, electronic soundtrack -- perfect for travel at night -- layers meaningful messages into a violent fairy tale about an unconventional hero.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

A patient, Jean-Pierre Melville-esque character study with flourishes of action. But it's more about atmosphere than adrenaline.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 8, 2023

Refn affirms his talents as a genre filmmaker and indulges in excesses and clichés reminiscent of '70s and '80s productions. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 4, 2022

Underneath the crafty and stylish surface lies a fairly simple and conventional action thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 20, 2022

One of the most iconic and stylish films of the twenty-first century

Full Review | Jun 2, 2022

...with no end of great, if ludicrous, fight choreography and stunt work, it is a guilty pleasure for action fans par excellence...

Full Review | Feb 24, 2022

Action buffed down to its essence and serving the purpose of an emotional reaction rather than a strictly visceral one

Full Review | Jan 10, 2022

Working from Hossain Amini's compelling, "driving" narrative script, director Refn delivers a masterclass in mood creation, playing with camera angles, shadows, film speed and sound to keep the audience fully engrossed.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 8, 2021

Drive's bravura opening highlighted that there's more than one way to execute a nail-biting car chase, especially when operating on an indie budget.

Full Review | Sep 20, 2021

Nicolas Winding Refn had an extremely distinct vision and saw something different in rom-com heartthrob Ryan Gosling. And when those two things collided, damn, was it cool.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

The movie looks fantastic and is still the best-looking example of the 2010s neon-aesthetic renaissance that it helped kick off.

Full Review | May 5, 2021

Poetic with its minimalism, excessive in its violence, and artistic with its presentation.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 30, 2020

Mulligan has made quite the career for herself in highly acclaimed yet frequently under-seen films.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 6, 2020

A violent yet stylish film that is very well made

Full Review | Jun 29, 2020

In 'Drive', a film directed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, we find an ingenious mix of the best of road cinema from the 70s and neo-noir criminal intrigue. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 24, 2020

Nicolas Winding Refn demonstrates an incredible understanding for the neon-infused loneliness of L.A. and its crime world underpinnings.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 4, 2020

This story affected me. I'll be watching Drive for the rest of my life, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a disturbing and romantic ride.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2020

It was a surprising Action Crime Drama that totally has you in the end of your seat anticipating on what will happen next.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jan 11, 2020

Calculating. Methodical. High gloss. Slick. Polished. Drive is the neo-noir thriller of the year.

Full Review | Nov 26, 2019

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A Twisty, Brutal 'Drive' For A Level-Headed Hero

David Edelstein

The Fast Lane : A Hollywood stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) earns a little extra by driving getaway cars by night. Richard Foreman/FilmDistrict hide caption

The hero of Drive is called "Driver" because that's what he does, and in a thriller this self-consciously existential, what he does is who he is.

He's played by Ryan Gosling as a kind of anti-blowhard. He's taciturn, watchful, cool. He works as a mechanic and sometimes a Hollywood driving stuntman. He also drives getaway cars with astonishing proficiency and a computer-like knowledge of L.A. surface streets, holding a matchstick between his teeth as if to keep his mouth from moving, and his feelings under wraps.

• Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
• Genre: Crime, Action, Drama
• Running Time: 100 minutes

Rated R for disturbing content and some language

But Driver down deep is one of God's Loneliest Men. He needs someone to love, to risk everything for, to give him a reason to drive.

Drive was a sensation at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where they really go for existential thrillers, and this recalls such arty French favorites as Walter Hill's The Driver and Michael Mann's Thief . The ambience is floating, the characters off to the side of the frame leaving lots of empty space.

What distinguishes Drive from its predecessors is the ultra-graphic violence — the sort that gore lovers call "wet." After each shooting, stabbing and stomping, you won't be saying, "Is he dead?"

Watch Clips

'Sorry About The Noise'

Credit: FilmDistrict

'West On 7th Street Bridge'

'He's A Good Guy'

The director is Nicolas Winding Refn, the Dane who made, among other films, a fast, tense crime trilogy called Pusher . He's a crackerjack craftsman. In an early heist sequence, Driver uses his knowledge of the urban maze to evade both cruisers and 'copters, and it's a tight, twisty piece of staging.

But Refn aims higher. He's said he's interested in the dark side of heroism, the way "righteous adherence to a code" can shift into the realm of the psychotic. I think he's more interested in punkish shock and splatter, and that he's just the guy to take Hollywood action to the next level: slick, amoral and unbelievably vicious.

The movie is cruel, but it isn't cold. Gosling lets emotion gradually bleed through Driver's impassive mask, and he becomes intensely likable. He has a tender relationship with Shannon, his manager in all three arenas — auto-repair, film stunts and crime --who's played by Breaking Bad 's Bryan Cranston in his third big movie of the last three months.

And boy, has Cranston earned that success. Shannon is a sweet, gimpy, luckless man who dreams of building a racecar to be driven by — who else? — Driver. For funding, he goes to Bernie Rose, a creepily inexpressive businessman played by, believe it or not, Albert Brooks.

Love thy neighbor: Our hero's one weakness is his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), with whom he imagines building a life — until harsh realities intrude. Richard Foreman Jr/FilmDistrict hide caption

Love thy neighbor: Our hero's one weakness is his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), with whom he imagines building a life — until harsh realities intrude.

How dirty is Bernie? It's well into Drive before you find out — and maybe an hour until the industrial-strength splatter. In the meantime, Driver becomes involved, platonically, with his neighbor, a pretty young mother named Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her lonely little boy. After some happy montages — ending with Driver giving up crime, hoping against hope for a life with Irene — the woman's husband suddenly gets out of prison, so that ends that pipe dream. Worse, the ex-con turns out to owe money to thugs who threaten to kill his wife and son if he doesn't rob a pawnshop for them. And so Driver is driven to make one last drive.

As you might have gathered from this synopsis, Drive is ridiculously contrived. But it works — and works you over. The carnage is so horrible that people at my screening cried out. And to think that in the middle of much of it is Albert Brooks. There's something magical about his performance. You can taste his pleasure in playing his cards close to the vest, in not — as in his own movies — having to work so hard to be crazily, humiliatingly vulnerable. Let everyone else, including the audience, writhe.

• Trending on RT

Ryan Gosling On Drive : This Is My Superhero Movie

The star talks movie mythology, his childhood obsession with rambo, and why he loves working with director nicolas winding refn..

Thanks to the unlikely combination of valiantly dispersing New York street fights and starring in one of the year’s best movies (hint: it’s not Blue Valentine ), Ryan Gosling has not only emerged as movies’ man of the moment — he’s also, at long last, apparently comfortable in becoming a genuine (and not just for The Notebook ) star.

In Drive , director Nicolas Winding Refn’s ( Bronson , Valhalla Rising ) neo-noir thriller, Gosling plays an enigmatic outsider known only as “Driver,” a Hollywood stunt jockey who moonlights as a getaway wheel man for a local crime boss. Co-starring Carey Mulligan and Albert Brooks, the film is a genre piece that evokes a long-gone era of car movies, with obvious antecedents like Walter Hill’s The Driver and William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. mixed with the dirty neon of a little-seen modern Los Angeles (Thom Anderson would approve ) and set to a pulsing electronic score from Cliff Martinez and Johnny Jewel.

We met with Gosling — who looked like he’d just stepped straight off the electric pastel poster for his movie — for a chat about Drive and working with Refn.

RT: You said that since everyone’s been doing a superhero movie you thought, “Why not do one?” Have you been approached to do superhero movies?

Ryan Gosling: Yeah.

Many times?

Mmm-hmm, yep.

But Drive ended up being the superhero movie for you?

This is the one. I wanted to make this one. I didn’t always know I was gonna get to make it, but I did.

What was it about the film? Had you read the script when Hugh Jackman and director Neil Marshall were attached to make it?

I think that might be the original one I read. I read a few drafts. I read one as well where he wasn’t a stunt driver at all, which was a newer draft — maybe that’s the one Hugh Jackman had; I’m not sure exactly. Basically when I read it, in trying to figure out who would do something like this, the only way to make sense of this is that this is a guy that’s seen too many movies, and he’s started to confuse his life for a film. He’s lost in the mythology of Hollywood and he’s become an amalgamation of all the characters that he admires.

I could relate to that because back when I was a kid, when I first saw First Blood , it kind of put a spell on me and I thought I was Rambo. I went to school the next day and I put all these knives in my Fisher-Price Houdini kit and I f**king threw them at all these kids at recess, and I got suspended. I didn’t hit any kids and I didn’t hurt anybody, thank god, but my parents were like, “You can’t watch violent movies anymore.” They were careful about what they showed me because [movies] really did have a big impact on me. They said I could only watch Bible movies and National Geographic films, but those are really f**king violent, you know [ laughs ] — but I could see where they were going.

So I connected to the film that way — in that films can cast spells. And cars can as well, because you get in a car, and you get out, and you don’t remember the trip, you know? There’s also something about cars where you can really put your identity in the driver’s seat: no one’s watching you, so you don’t have to be self-conscious — you can just watch. I can put a kind of spell on you. So the idea of movie mythology and the idea of the car being a vehicle to take you in to someone’s subconscious felt like there was a possibility for a kind of a superhero film, about a guy who wants to be a superhero.

On a side note, I always wanted to see a violent John Hughes movie. I love John Hughes, but if there was a head smashing in Pretty in Pink , then it would be perfect. [ Laughs ]

How did this recall a John Hughes movie for you?

It became that once we started thinking. It wasn’t that initially. The original script was much more authentic to Los Angeles gang culture and the reality; it was more realistic. We wanted this to be more of a fairytale, like a Grimm brothers fairytale, so we had to change it. In the process of writing it we were talking about movies and for some reason we ended up talking about John Hughes movies and, like, Purple Rain . There’s something about this character: he has cinematic ideas of romance, and he lives in a fantasy. And that’s what John Hughes movies are — they’re just all cotton candy and champagne. The movie needed that, but it also needed a little blood on the cotton candy, to give it balance. We used that as a guide.

You got to personally choose Nicolas as the director — a guy who also explored the blurring of character and mythology recently in Bronson and Valhalla Rising . What was it about him that made you feel he was right for this film?

He fetishizes the frame. Everything in the frame has to physically turn him on, and if it doesn’t, he won’t shoot it. So he makes very personal films, because he only shoots what he wants to see. His movies have a real identity, and he won’t repeat himself. They’re movies that you want to see in a movie theater. You don’t wanna see them at home. You know, in Valhalla Rising , when One Eye cuts the guts out of his friend and shows him his own guts, and everyone starts freaking out and hitting each other and laughing and they don’t know how to feel — you wanna be in a theater to experience that. I wanted this movie to be a film you wanted to see in a movie theater, and I think those are the kinds of films that he makes. I also feel like he and I were sharing the same dream, and kind of continue to — so I could fight for his inability to make anything that’s not personal, because it’s also personal to me.

Drive opens in US theaters this week, September 23 in the UK, and October 27 in Australia.

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The 11 Worst Movie Musicals of the 21st Century, Ranked

'the mandalorian and grogu' movie just got closer to our screens, the 10 mcu characters better than their comic book counterpart.

Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive works across time and genre.  It's set in present-day Los Angeles, uses an 80s score and soundtrack, features a tragic 50s noir protagonist, and wraps everyone up in archetypical figures that manage to feel fresh through strong performances and gorgeous cinematography.  It's a film that confidently walks the line between alienating its audience with bold choices but it never strays so far into the obtuse or the strange that you lose the hard-boiled crime story simmering underneath.  It constantly challenges the audience to look away with its intensity, its thoughtfulness, and its brutality, but it's too damn entertaining to look away.

Like all great noir protagonists, the Driver (Ryan Gosling) has a code and it makes him good at his job.  He's a stunt-driver by day, but at night his true driving talent shines when he works as a wheelman.  He can outrun his pursuers when necessary, but his real strength is in his reserve and patience in the face of danger.  While he attempts to keep others at a distance, he eventually warms up to his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son Benecio.  When Irene's husband Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac) gets out of prison, he comes home and owes protection money to bad folks.  The Driver decides he'll help Gabriel on a job in order to protect Irene and Benecio, but matters then fall apart as shady figures Nino (Ron Perlman) and Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) come into play.  Like all great noir protagonists, The Driver breaks from his code to do something honorable and it leads to his downfall.

In recent years, Gosling has become one of Hollywood's most respected actors and in Drive he turns in a career-best performance.  He plays the characters' emotions close to the vest and tries to convey as much as possible with minor expressions.  What's remarkable is that he's able to craft such a rich and interesting character without playing it all on the surface and then has to show how the identity deteriorates over the course of the film.  It's a bizarre mix of nobility, detachment, and violent madness but Gosling brings it all together to make an utterly compelling character who holds your attention in every single frame.

Telling a cinematic story from the POV of its protagonist isn't simply a matter of doing a POV-shot and Gosling isn't the only one who inhabits the Driver's calm exterior and explosive rage.  Refn matches Gosling's performance shot for shot and it's beautiful to see an actor's delivery and a director's vision work in such perfect harmony.  However, when the Driver starts to emotionally unravel and struggles to understand his own identity, Refn keeps his cool and manages to balance the insanity of the action with the pathos of the main character.

The film is filled with great performances but despite having heavyweights like Carey Mulligan and Bryan Cranston in the cast, the biggest characters are played by Gosling and Brooks.  They're the real powerhouses and I have to give Brooks his due.  You have never seen him play a character like this before and he's tremendous as a villain who's beguiling, intelligent, and absolutely ruthless.  In some ways, The Driver and Rose are two sides of the same coin in terms of their personalities and their ethics, but that's an essay for another time.

Plenty of essays could be written about Drive .  It's the rare film where I immediately wanted to watch it again, but would like to pause it and scribble down plenty of notes.  So many great ideas swirl around hard-boiled crime story and you can get lost dissecting it as a character piece, as a product of genre cinema, or even breaking down the cleverness of the cinematography.  Sometimes the visuals become overt like when the lights in the elevator dim and the Driver and Irene have their first kiss.  Other times it sneaks in like when Irene tells the Driver that her husband is getting out of jail and we can see a red light reflected off their faces.  Every shot is purposeful and well-constructed that you just want to take the movie frame-by-frame and sit in awe.

I've been a fan of Refn ever since watch the Pusher trilogy and Bronson , but his American-debut is his strongest film yet.  As he did with his previous films, he takes a simple genre (in this case an action-crime flick) and twists its conventions and rethinks its possibilities and comes away with a magnificent reinvention.  Drive is an exhilarating ride where the thrills are as raw and intense as the emotions.

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A mysterious Hollywood action film stuntman gets in trouble with gangsters when he tries to help his neighbor's husband rob a pawn shop while serving as his getaway driver. A mysterious Hollywood action film stuntman gets in trouble with gangsters when he tries to help his neighbor's husband rob a pawn shop while serving as his getaway driver. A mysterious Hollywood action film stuntman gets in trouble with gangsters when he tries to help his neighbor's husband rob a pawn shop while serving as his getaway driver.

• Nicolas Winding Refn
• Hossein Amini
• James Sallis
• Ryan Gosling
• Carey Mulligan
• Bryan Cranston
• 1.8K User reviews
• 726 Critic reviews
• 79 Metascore
• 79 wins & 180 nominations total

Top cast 37

• Bernie Rose

• (as Joey Bucaro)

• Young Woman

• Bearded Redneck
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia In preparation for his role, Ryan Gosling restored the 1973 Chevy Malibu that his character uses in the film.
• Goofs In one shot, the tachometer on Driver's steering column reads 0 RPMs and none of the other gauges are reading normally for driving. This is likely due to the vehicle being towed on a dolly. The tachometer can be seen working in other shots.

[first lines]

Driver : [on phone] 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. No matter what. Anything happens a minute either side of that and you're on your own. Do you understand?

Driver : Good. And you won't be able to reach me on this phone again.

• Alternate versions The preview version of the movie has slightly different dialogue in the telephone conversation between Bernie Rose and Driver preceding the meeting at the Great Wall restaurant. Regular theatrical cut Driver: [to Bernie] You know the story about the scorpion and the frog? Your friend Nino didn't make it across the river. Preview version Bernie Rose: Where's Nino? Driver: He's Gone. The reference to the story about the scorpion and the frog was left out of the preview version.
• Connections Featured in Ebert Presents: At the Movies: Episode #1.19 (2011)
• Soundtracks Tick of the Clock Written by Johnny Jewel Performed by Chromatics (as The Chromatics) Courtesy of Italians Do It Better Records

User reviews 1.8K

• Jul 3, 2014
• How long is Drive? Powered by Alexa
• Is 'Drive' based on a book?
• Why did the pawn shop owner say only one man was involved in the robbery and that no money was taken?
• What kind of classic car is he driving in the dry ravine?
• September 16, 2011 (United States)
• United States
• Le Pacte (France)
• Official Facebook
• Drive, el escape
• Point Mugu, California, USA (end of the car chase)
• FilmDistrict
• Madison Wells
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $15,000,000 (estimated)
• $35,061,555
• $11,340,461
• Sep 18, 2011
• $79,747,261

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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