The title of Baby Driver alludes to the extreme insouciant youth of its wheelman hero, played by Ansel Elgort, and a certain track that unspools over the closing credits. It is a terrifically stylish and exciting piece of work, a summer movie cool enough to induce brain freeze, like an episode of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke directed by Walter Hill.
Elgort plays a brilliant teenage getaway driver working for Kevin Spacey’s equally deadpan Doc, a man who masterminds well-planned bank robberies with a crew including the chiseled Buddy (Jon Hamm), badass Darling (Eiza González) and the scarily unstable Bats (Jamie Foxx). Baby needs continuous music from his range of antique iPods to give him inspiration, miming along to the track while he chucks his car around in breathtaking stunts. It’s also because he suffers from tinnitus and needs the music to drown out the noise.
Baby Driver is a little like Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 80s Parisian thriller Diva, with its tape providing soundtrack excitement, and giving us a popping score that comes somewhere between diegetic and non-diegetic music: music that is supposed to exist literally in the action, that is, the music coming from Baby’s earphones, and music that exists only on the soundtrack, imposed from without. There are times when the explosions and gunshots coincide with drum breaks too neatly to be purely a realist coincidence, and that is part of the joke and part of the effect.
Baby is a guy with unhappy memories, revealed in flashback montages. He is not really a criminal – his brilliance at driving and obsession with music stem from an early-years trauma – and he is being forced by Doc to perform these robberies. But then Baby meets and falls in love with a waitress at a diner where his late mother used to work, and this is Debora, winningly played by Lily James.
It’s such a funny and engaging film, packed with sheer brio and good nature, showcased most entertainingly in Baby’s amble down the street to get coffee for his comrades, and then his amble back, showing all the resulting streetscape vignettes in reverse. There’s an inspired use of the Damned’s Neat Neat Neat. If I had a problem with the picture, it is that the connoisseur pop is sometimes made to work too easily to provide instant ambient pleasure that might otherwise come from a finely tuned screenplay, with verbal riffs and linguistic hooks of the sort that Tarantino wrote for True Romance or Pulp Fiction. Wright brilliantly used Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now in his 2004 debut Shaun of the Dead. Here he brings out Queen’s Brighton Rock. Good call. But I wonder if, like Wayne and Garth in Wayne’s World, he should have been unafraid of obviousness and simply cranked up the greatest in-car Queen choice.
But this is just being a little nit picky, and there is actually a lot of ambient verbal pleasure here. I loved the robbers’ quarrel in the car about their names, and it needing to be pointed out that these are just their nicknames, handles or monikers – confusingly, because Darling’s name is Monica.
Like all car chase movies, Baby Driver sticks to the essentially romantic convention that the car chase is that part of criminality that is miraculously and almost redemptively sinless and victimless, dangerous only for the criminals. There is no question of the getaway car accidentally running over an innocent bystander, which is what happens with real-world car chases all the time.
And here, Baby is concerned to prevent needless death, often with acrobatic genius, and of course miming along with eerie accuracy to some exquisitely chosen pop hits. Wright has turned the classic iPod into the new mixtape.
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