Drive will seem familiar to many people. You may even think you have seen it before. As you watch, you think of all the movies it reminds you of: American Psycho, Taxi Driver, Collateral or even Drive Angry (ick). Let’s not get too technical here though. 

Based on the 2006 novel by James Sallis, Drive is most like Camus’ The Outsider onscreen, but set in present-day Los Angeles. A man (Gosling) comes from nowhere and begins a new life driving stunt cars in movies and moonlighting as a getaway driver . He has no name, but he is by no means an everyman. He experiences life along a membrane, in much the same way as we experience the film. No matter how graphic the violence or how tense the car chase  as one of his after hours jobs goes wrong, when it’s over, all we are left with is  Gosling’s impassive, chiselled face and a California sunset. The music, by French electro house artist Kavinsky, mutes the action, but never distils it.

Motivations and reasons for the driver recede into the background, done so on purpose by Refn and the screenwriter Hossein Amini, who left out much of the driver’s back story which is present in the novel. What is clear, though, is that everyone is an outsider. Carey Mulligan as a young mother is an anomaly among the Hispanic community into which she marries, Ron Perlman’s ridiculous, vulgar con man is a Jew in the Italian Mafia, and Gosling belongs nowhere. They all come together for a few days, then disappear into the ether. But, Drive is not a waste of time. Refn’s experiments with light and mirrors coupled with excellently short performances from Joan Holloway and Oscar Isaac give the film the texture and contradiction it needs to assure its longevity as a tentative modern masterpiece.