‘There’s something inside you, it’s hard to explain, they’re talking about you, boy, but you’re still the same...’

We follow Driver, a stoic Hollywood stuntman moonlighting as a getaway driver, as he navigates the veins of a sleeping Los Angeles with a police scanner as his guide. When he lets his married neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son into his solitary world, he finds himself torn between a gentle desire for love and a capacity for ice-cold violence.

Ryan Gosling pulls up as Driver, heralded by the hypnotic synths of Kavinsky’s ‘Nightcall’ , cementing at once both the defining hero and anthem of neon-noir. In his first true action role, the former Disney child star channels his romance and indie personas to embody a modern knight in tarnished armor (in the form of a scorpion jacket), a lone sigma who has strayed from the pack, silently and violently enduring unrequited longing in a gritty cityscape.

For love, he will become a monster, and we get him—he’s literally me.

Nicolas Winding Refn (b. 1970, Denmark) is a Danish film director, screenwriter, and producer. Raised in both Copenhagen and New York City, Refn comes from a family of filmmakers: his father, Anders Refn, is a film director, and his mother, Vibeke Winding, is a cinematographer.

Refn received critical acclaim with the Pusher trilogy (1996–2005), which was his directorial debut, then the crime drama Bronson (2008) and the surrealistic period film Valhalla Rising (2009). His films are known for their chronological storytelling and highly contrasting colours. In 2011, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for ‘Best Director’ for the action-drama Drive (2011), for which he was also nominated for the BAFTA Award for ‘Best Direction’. Refn's subsequent works include the action film Only God Forgives (2013) and the psychological horror The Neon Demon (2016).