BABY DRIVER (A-minus) - The rock star of summer films, this propulsive pulp fiction from Edgar Wright hums from beginning to end, a dazzle of visual and aural delights.
It wouldn't be half-wrong to call this tale of a baby-faced getaway driver a musical. Wright -- the mastermind behind zombie and alien spoofs "Shaun of the Dead" and "The World's End" and the cult classic "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" -- must have lived and breathed this script and the soundtrack for years, marinating his brain in it until he splashed this spectacle (seemingly effortlessly) onto the big screen. The percussive sounds of the movie -- the riffling of a packet of money, the chk-chk of an automatic weapon -- are frequently synced with the beat of the songs, culminating in a shootout and its rat-a-tat-tats that pulse along with the guitar and synthesizer bursts in "Hocus Pocus" by Focus.
Ansel Elgort (the dreamboat from "The Fault in Our Stars" and the "Divergent" series) shows some acting chops as Baby, the super-driver who lives with earbuds pumping rhythms into his brain to cover up the tinnitus in his ears, the result of a childhood auto accident that killed his quarreling parents. He works for Doc (Kevin Spacey), who shuffles various teams of criminals for his carefully planned heists. He also lives with a foster parent who is deaf and just heart-broken over Baby's indentured servitude that resulted from Baby's earlier attempt to rip off Doc. Now Baby is close to paying off that debt.
Baby falls for an old-timey waitress, Debora (Lily James, "Cinderella"), who has the wide face and imploring eyes of, well, a Disney princess. They not only meet-cute but they stay cute together amid all the ugliness and violence. They share their love of music, mined from their parents' record collections. And they dream of a "getaway," a romantic, nostalgic escape from Atlanta with no particular place to go. Baby is as wholesome as they come; there is no way he will let the bad guys take down Debora or the old man.
This could have devolved into your typical parade of heists, but "Baby Driver" is so much more than that. And more than the sum of its parts. It is a heady mix of musical cues (many of them catchy R&B nuggets), flashes of color, choreographed traipses (a simple errand for coffee becomes an homage to "Footloose"), parkour-inspired foot chases, jump cuts, and intricate wordplay. The brash storytelling is giddy fun, as Wright, now in his early '40s, exhibits a confidence that you see in movies by Danny Boyle, Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino.
Wright flirts with a masterpiece, but his exuberance trips him up a few times. Spacey is fine as a crime boss, but his staccato delivery gets wearying and borders on parody whenever he threatens Baby and his loved ones. The pulp climax strains credulity, including the tired trope of the Villain Who Won't Die. Even the opening scene, featuring Baby lip-syncing and slapping the side of his cherry red Subaru while he awaits the fleeing bank robbers, might make you worried out of the gate -- would a getaway driver really mindlessly draw that much attention to himself?
But any worries are tossed aside almost immediately, as the first chase careers along to a funky Jon Spencer workout ("Bellbottoms"). And the cast is all-in. Foxx just doesn't fuck around, and Hamm can still toss out a chilling wolf leer. They are complemented by a few cameos by the likes of Flea (bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers) as Eddie (formerly Eddie the Nose, now Eddie No-Nose); Paul Williams as a pimped-out weapons dealer; and Lanny Joon as JD who alters the HATE tattoo on his neck to read HAT -- with a lopsided heart replacing the E -- a pathetic sop to the job-interview process. ("How's that working out for you?" Baby asks him. "Who doesn't like hats," JD spits back.)
And did I mention the music? The soundtrack crackles and snaps, jolts and jumps. It's as if the music came first and Wright just tossed off a script to accompany it. Baby's love of music involves a hobby of creating electronic remixes of snippets of conversations that he records on a handheld analog cassette machine. One, labeled "MOM," is his most prized possession. (Mom was an aspiring singer.) Baby is addicted to his old iPods that he juggles in a rotation depending on his mood. Music kickstarts his brain. In a memorable scene, he hijacks a car but is paralyzed momentarily until he can scan the radio stations to find just the right getaway music. Cue "Radar Love" as the tires squeal.
Meanwhile, the visuals are dizzying. Cameras whirl and whirr, neon signs blaze at night, and primary colors tumble playfully in the background of a laundromat. It is all so intoxicating and propulsive. You want to jump into the screen and play along.
This is the new cool. Same as the old cool. An extended groove. It's the magic of movie-making.
BONUS TRACKS
The soundtrack is a killer mix of old-, older- and oldest-school. Just a few samples, starting with "Neat Neat Neat" by the Damned:
Carla Thomas with "Baby":
And El-P, Killer Mike and Big Boi with "Chase Me":
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