Drive (2011)

Definitely suffers from the fact that this represents Nicolas Winding Refn’s peak and not, as it seemed back in 2011, his arrival as a gamechanging auteur following Bronson and Valhalla Rising. Now part of me suspects that the reason this stands apart from the rest of his films is because it’s the one he didn’t have a hand in writing — his sense of style is in full display, but Drive is tighter and less nihilistic than Only God Forgives or The Neon Demon while, dispiritingly, managing to maintain his lack of interest in women beyond their status as objects men find themselves attracted to and willing to die for in order to obtain.

It also helps that the music still whips, beating Twin Peaks: The Return to this sonic palette by several years, and that filling out the cast is a Super Smash Bros.-esque roster of all-stars from the period’s biggest cable TV hits. Sure, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, and Ron Perlman are playing broad noir cliches, but all of them look like they’re having a blast doing it, as does Albert Brooks, who is really the star of the show as Perlman’s put-upon partner, who asked for none of the trouble visited upon his operation.

Ryan Gosling … really wears that jacket well. He also does a great job inhabiting the sort of psycho masculinity that is frequently presented as straight-up heroism in most American movies, an Eastwood-ian drifter whose outer cool masks a slow-boiling rage. In another universe his Driver is a slasher who, unlike Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, lets his driving do the talking. Here he’s whatever you want to project onto him — your own male power fantasies, your hangups with male power fantasies, a hot guy in a cool jacket. It works, and so does Drive, just not as well as it used to.