Drive is going to fill one and possibly two niches this year. It will be the best movie that many people never bother to see, and it will also be the best movie that many people saw accidentally, expecting it to be a cheap Transporter knock-off. In either case, it will almost certainly be underappreciated. There’s this guy, played by Ryan Gosling, who seems to be drifting through life at a huge remove from everyone else. While they are hiring him to be a getaway driver, or clumsily mentoring him[1], or paying him for movie stunts, he just seems to observe it all, sometimes with a slightly bemused smile, more often laconic and blank-faced. Which is a pity, because those rare smiles give a window into his inner life that implies more pure joy than most characters convey with reams of dialogue and spontaneous jigs.

But when an accident of geography entangles him in the lives of his pretty, world-saddened neighbor, her son, and her imprisoned husband, well… I don’t want to say much, since you already know that he’ll be in for the drive of his life, or else what a terrible name for a movie. I guess it’s like this. If that sounds like a set-up for the client-of-the-week section of an episode of Burn Notice, it should. But the fallout is a lot less like Michael Westen’s always slick solutions and a lot more like the 1970s era cinema that inspired Quentin Tarantino. But, okay, do you know what Drive is the most like? I hesitate to say this, because it will so easily be construed as less than high praise, but, it reminds me of nothing so much as what someone could have easily written as the plot progression of a mission arc in a modern Grand Theft Auto game. Mostly imprintable anti-hero? Check. Conflicts with cops and other criminals alike as events spiral out of control? Check. Sympathetic characters humanizing the proceedings? Most definitely.

I’m not surprised by the Fresh Air reviewer who said it was the darling of Cannes this year. Movies like this just don’t get made anymore, and lucky us that someone failed to realize it.

[1] Enough good can probably not be said about Bryan Cranston, so I will not try harder than I just have.