Drive’ is a supercharged exercise in style

The idea of making a neo-noir is nothing new (say that five times real fast), even when your intent is to ape the authentic. Even post-“Pulp Fiction,” an exercise that Tarantino used to change the very landscape of contemporary noir — camping it in a way that influenced filmmaking for the next decade — it’s possible to find a return to the roots.

Danish-born filmmaker Nicholas Winding Refn proves that well enough with “Drive,” a taut little noir starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, Oscar Isaacs and, strangely enough, Albert Brooks.

“Drive” tells the story of a guy who seems to be a vacuum. All he does is drive. For the movies, part-time, to do crashes and other stunts. For pleasure, throughout the night, probing the back streets of Los Angeles. And for criminals who need a sure-handed ally with wheels who can negotiate his way around pursuing police cars and even the occasional eye-in-the-sky chopper.

But as played by Gosling, we get a notion that Driver has more to offer when he meets the woman (Mulligan) and her son who live in the apartment down the hall. It’s hard to say whether the woman, the cute little boy, both together or just the idea of them is what attracts him. But, slowly, Driver is lured in.

Meanwhile, his boss/friend/connection (Cranston) sets him up with jobs, both straight and criminal. Yet the boss, too, desires a straight life, one that he thinks he can attatin with Driver’s help: creation of a winning racing team. All he needs is the capital, which is why he approaches a local mob guy (Brooks) and his psycho partner (Perlman). Uh-oh.

At the same time, Driver’s little family scene is threatened when the woman’s husband (Isaacs) is released early from prison. But just when you think trouble will ensue with a jealous mate, “Drive” takes us in a different direction. Because the husband is in trouble, which also threatens wife and child, and so he asks Driver for help. And maybe just to protect his fantasy life, Driver agrees. Double uh-oh.

Because there is the fatal flaw that is at the heart of every classic noir ever made: a character wants something, and in trying to make it happen finds himself over his head. Pretty soon Driver is involved in an aborted robbery, heads disappearing in shotgunned mist, faces being stomped into bone pulp, flashing blades and even an oceanside drowning. “Drive” is an exercise in bloodletting unmatched in recent years.

The point? Maybe nothing more than that of the classic noir: There is no happiness in this life, only desire and frustration and, ultimately, death. Oh, though, there is also the chance to do something good, to sacrifice for another, which offers some sort of redemption. For whatever solace that will earn you.

“Drive” has a couple of flaws. The credits sequence, which comes after a taut introductory escape scene, nearly stops the film as effectively as a too tightly charged set of air brakes. And I could have done without an extended music video set along the L.A. River basin (seemingly close to where the “Terminator” rode a motorcycle).

Overall, though, the film works as smoothly as a purring supercharged engine set in an ordinary Impala frame. Gosling gives substance to a character who in other hands would have been a mere shadow. And the others, from Cranson to Mulligan to Brooks, fit in nicely. Refn has given us a film that doesn’t compromise, doesn’t let up, doesn’t disappoint — unless, of course, you expect a noir to betray its source material and turn into something made by Disney.

No problem there with “Drive.”