Driven performance makes drama work

It sounds contrived, and it is. It sounds like a bit of a stunt, and it is that, too.

It might even sound boring, but, that, it is not.

In fact, the micro-budgeted Locke combines whip-smart filmmaking by writer-director Steven Knight and his team with Tom Hardy’s mesmerizing acting to make the independent British movie more minuteto-minute involving than more costly extravaganzas.

Although the credits list a dozen actors, Hardy alone appears on-screen in the realtime drama, which unfolds

Locke. Directed by Steven Knight.

R (for language)

1:25

at the Gateway and Lennox 24 theaters inside a moving BMW during the 85 minutes it takes construction foreman Ivan Locke to make a nighttime drive from Birmingham to London.

As played by Hardy, Locke is driving while engaged in an almost-continuous series of hands-free phone conversations as he desperately tries to keep parts of his orderly life from collapsing.

Locke stands out both for the way filmmaker Knight conceived and executed it and for the hypnotic acting Hardy brings to the table.

As the drive and the phone calls unfold, we become aware that protagonist Locke is facing a trio of linked crises that could turn his life upside down.

A husband who has built his life around being dependable, Locke is leaving town on the night before what should be the capstone day of his career: overseeing the biggest nonmilitary concrete pour in European history.

Locke’s insistence that he won’t be there infuriates his boss (Ben Daniels) and terrifies his second in command (Andrew Scott).

Locke is driving to be present at the birth of a baby he is the father of, the result of a onenight stand with Bethan (Olivia Colman), a woman he barely knows. Her phone call sets off the chain of events in the film.

Locke is a coolheaded pragmatist. Although that hardly ensures that everything is going to work out, it does mean that our involvement with his predicament is total.

It takes an actor of undeniable power and quiet conviction to make this happen, and without a performer of Hardy’s gifts, Locke would be difficult to imagine.