Baby Driver,
Summer can finally start now: “Baby Driver” is that blast of energy we’ve all been waiting for.
A heist movie on wheels that also doubles as a feature-length music video — writer/director Edgar Wright packs some 30 finger-snapping tunes into the soundtrack — it’s both a visual and sonic adrenalin rush. It leaves the rusty “Fast & Furious” franchise choking in its dust.
Watch how Wright choreographs the opening bank heist, with title getaway wheelman Baby (Ansel Elgort) squealing his red Subaru in every direction as he as his criminal comrades evade the cops on Atlanta’s crowded streets.
The scene is set to the pulse of the guitars/snare/strings punk symphony “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, whose members never figured back in 1994 that they were making music to rob banks by.
Ditto for other acts on this eclectic soundscape, ranging from rock and R&B (Queen, Golden Earring, Barry White, Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas) to alt-rock, rap and dance (Beck, Young M.C., Danger Mouse) and more.
They all magnificently come together in Baby’s iPods, different ones for different days and moods. He listens to them incessantly, both to motivate himself and to drown out the “hum on the drum” of tinnitus, the result of a tragic childhood accident that also left him with tiny scars on his baby face.
“Hum on the drum” is a phrase coined by Baby’s crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey, rarely better) who talks like a Beat poet, if there was such as thing as a Beat poet who would also break your legs for no good reason.
Doc commands an amusing crew of desperadoes, played by Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez and Jon Bernthal, who look and act as though they should be in an R-rated version of a Looney Tunes episode.
They’re cartoon hoods, especially Foxx and Hamm, who both could probably survive a 500pound Acme weight being dropped on them.
But Baby is for real, guile in the guise of innocence. He doesn’t say much, making him all the more watchable.
Baby’s actually a good kid caught in a bad situation. He’s working off a debt to Doc by driving for him and Doc will keep his word, right? Right?
Afterwards, Baby has plans to skip town with his new love Deborah (Lily James), a sweet diner waitress who has never heard the T. Rex or Beck tunes she might have been named for (but she soon will).
If you want more story than this, “Baby Driver” may not be your make and model. It builds to such a fever pitch, it looks at times like it’s about to become of one those race cars that explodes into flames after spinning out. And there are some violent scenes that are anything but kid’s stuff.
But Wright’s a past master at organizing chaos and setting it all to music, as witness a resumé that includes the genre-bending comedies “Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz,” “The World’s End” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”
He hears things in songs that he turns into soundtrack magic and he sees things in actors that others might not — who else, other than maybe Quentin Tarantino, would have figured Elgort from the sappy young-adult drama “The Fault in Our Stars” could play a gravity-defying getaway driver?
“You call, I’m there,” is the kid’s motto, and with Elgort behind the wheel and Wright as the engine, “Baby Driver” becomes the movie that finally gets the summer movie season motoring.