10+ / 10
Official trailer
Baby Driver is phenomenal. I love the way the music and the pictures move together, and I’ve never seen another film pull that off for two hours straight. Edgar Wright wrote and directed it, and every chase, every gunshot and half the dialogue land on a beat of whatever song is playing in the kid’s earbuds.
Ansel Elgort plays Baby. Kevin Spacey plays Doc, the planner who owns him. Jon Hamm, Eiza González and Jamie Foxx are the crews he drives for, and Lily James is the waitress he wants to run away with. It cost $34 million, made $227 million worldwide, and picked up three Academy Award nominations: film editing, sound editing and sound mixing. Those three categories tell you where the film shines.
Heist movies are a dime a dozen, and the plot here’s one you’ve seen: the driver who wants out, the one last job, the girl, the boss who won’t let go. I don’t care. The plot is a clothesline. Everything worth watching hangs off it.
The Setup
Baby drives getaway cars in Atlanta. A car crash killed his parents when he was a kid and left him with tinnitus, so he keeps music playing all the time to drown out the ringing. He owes Doc for a car he once stole, and he’s been paying it off one robbery at a time.
The film opens on a bank job. Three robbers go inside, Baby waits at the wheel with “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in his ears, and then the job goes loud and he takes the police apart for about six minutes. The whole chase is cut to the song. When the guitar stops, the car stops. When the song kicks back in, so does the pursuit.
After that he meets Debora in a diner, she’s humming a song that has his name in it, and he falls for her on the spot. Doc has more jobs lined up. Baby wants out and can’t find the door. That’s the story, and it doesn’t need to be more than that.
A Heist Cut to a Playlist
Plenty of films play a good song over a car chase. Baby Driver does something else. The gunfire lands on the drums. Doors slam on the downbeat. A wall of graffiti behind Baby as he walks for coffee spells out the lyrics of the song he’s listening to. The movie was written to the tracks, so the songs were picked before a frame was shot, and the scenes were built to fit them.
The playlist runs about thirty songs, and it’s all over the place: T. Rex, Queen, Beck, Golden Earring, Barry White, Carla Thomas, Run the Jewels, and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Baby Driver” for the title. That jumble is character.
Nobody assembled it for the soundtrack album. It sounds like a kid who collected whatever got him through the day.
I’d put this soundtrack up against most greatest-hits records. The jumps from Barry White to Run the Jewels shouldn’t work, and every one of them does, because it’s one kid’s taste and he doesn’t care what anybody thinks of it.
Editors Jonathan Amos and Paul Machliss worked alongside Wright for years to hold the timing together across thousands of cuts, and the Oscar nominations are for exactly that. What you feel in the theater is simpler than the work behind it: the picture and the music are one thing, and for two hours you don’t notice where one stops.
For Writers
Wright didn’t add the music in the edit. He wrote the screenplay to the songs, scene lengths and dialogue included, so the film’s signature is built into the page. When you write, find the one idea your story is built on and put it in the first draft. If you can remove the thing that makes your book different without the plot collapsing, it’s decoration. Take your central device and write one scene where the plot couldn’t happen without it. Then make every other scene lean on it too. The strongest stories can’t be summarized without their central idea, and neither should yours.
Ansel Elgort’s Baby
Elgort barely talks. Baby answers questions in single words, hides behind sunglasses and earbuds, and lets everybody else in the room assume he’s slow. He’s listening, he’s memorizing, and he’s the only one in the crew who knows exactly where every car will be in ten seconds.
Most of the performance is physical. Baby dances down the sidewalk on a coffee run, drums on the steering wheel, lip-syncs in the back of a meeting where men are planning a robbery. Elgort had to hit marks timed to the music while acting, and he makes it look like a kid who can’t sit still.
The quiet scenes with his foster father, Joseph, are the heart of the film. CJ Jones plays Joseph, who’s deaf, and the two of them talk in sign language. Those scenes are the only place Baby says what he thinks, and they tell you why he wants out: there’s one person in his life he doesn’t want to disappoint.
The Crew
Jamie Foxx plays Bats, and he’s frightening. Bats talks too much, trusts nobody and decides early that the quiet kid is a cop. Every scene he’s in feels like it could turn into a shooting, and a couple of them do.
Jon Hamm plays Buddy, who starts as the most reasonable man in the gang: charming, a little protective of Baby, clearly in love with Darling, played by Eiza González. Keep an eye on him. When Darling dies in the last robbery, Buddy turns into the villain of the film, and Hamm makes the turn feel like it was sitting there all along.
Hamm’s turn is the performance I’d point to first. I liked Buddy for an hour, the film counted on that, and when he flips I feel a little foolish for trusting him. I think it’s the smartest casting in the picture.
Kevin Spacey plays Doc with a dry, quick menace, and the part works. The film came out in June 2017, a few months before the allegations that ended Spacey’s career, so for many viewers his scenes now carry baggage the film never asked for. Lily James gives Debora enough warmth that you believe Baby would risk everything for a waitress he’s known a week.
The Driving
The chases are real. Wright shot the driving practically, with stunt drivers on actual Atlanta streets and highways, and you can feel the weight of the cars. When Baby spins a red Subaru between two trucks, a car is doing that, and your body knows it.
The opening chase is the one people remember, but the others vary the tune. There’s a foot chase through a mall and backyards after Baby abandons a car, played for panic.
There’s a gunfight at an arms deal timed to “Tequila,” and it’s the funniest shootout in years. Wright never lets the gimmick run on autopilot.
The driving is also how Baby talks. He can’t tell Doc no. He can tell a police cruiser no at eighty miles an hour, and the film understands that the only place this kid has any power is behind the wheel.
For Writers
Every chase in Baby Driver was shot with real cars and real drivers, and the audience feels the difference even when it can’t name it. Physical truth sells a scene faster than spectacle. When you write action, stop describing the explosion and start describing what the body in the middle of it feels: the seatbelt biting, the tires going light, the smell of the brakes. Pick the most violent scene in your draft and rewrite it using only what your character can see, hear and feel in that moment. Cut every word the character couldn’t know, and read the scene out loud. If it makes your heart rate climb, keep it.
Edgar Wright’s Long Road
Wright had been carrying this idea for more than twenty years. In 2003 he directed a music video for Mint Royale’s “Blue Song” in which a getaway driver sings along in his car while a robbery happens behind him. That’s Baby Driver in miniature, and he spent the next decade and a half working out how to stretch it to feature length.
You can see his fingerprints everywhere: fast cuts, snap zooms, jokes that live in the edit, and the same love of music he brought to Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Here he finally gets to build a whole movie around the one thing he’s always done best.
He hasn’t topped it since. Last Night in Soho has style to spare, but Baby Driver is the one where the idea, the story and the craft line up perfectly. It’s a director’s dream project that turned out as good as the dream.
The Last Act
The final robbery goes wrong the way these things always do. Bats kills a man during the job, Baby refuses to drive on and then wrecks the car, and Bats dies in the crash. Police cut down Darling in the shootout that follows, and Buddy decides Baby is responsible. From there it’s a grudge.
Doc surprises everyone, including himself, and helps Baby and Debora get away before Buddy kills him. That’s the film’s one moment of grace for its villain, and it plays because it’s brief. Then Buddy comes after the kids.
The parking-garage showdown is the ugliest sequence in the film on purpose. Buddy fires a pistol right beside Baby’s ears and deafens him, and for the first time the music stops. Without his soundtrack, Baby has to fight the way a scared kid fights. It’s messy, it’s frightening, and it’s the right way to end a movie that’s been in control of every beat for ninety minutes.
When the music cuts out, the film grabs me by the collar. It’s spent the whole running time teaching me to feel every beat, and then it takes the beat away, and I feel that silence in my chest. It’s my favorite moment in the movie.
The Ending
Baby could run. He doesn’t. He gives himself up at a roadblock, and at his trial the people he treated decently along the way speak up for him. He gets twenty-five years with a chance at parole after five. Debora waits. When he walks out, she’s standing by a car, and the film lets them drive off to an ending it doesn’t explain. I like that it makes him pay. A heist film that lets its hero skate would have cheapened everything the music built.
For Writers
The film doesn’t let its hero off. He turns himself in, serves time, and only then gets the girl and the open road. An earned ending hits harder than a clever one. When you write your ending, ask what your protagonist owes for the choices they made, then make them pay it on the page before you reward them. Go through your final chapter and list every consequence your hero has dodged. Pick the biggest one and make them face it before the last scene. Readers forgive a hero almost anything except getting away with it.
Craft Note
Craft Note
I don’t know a better case for building a story around one structural idea and never letting go of it than Baby Driver. Wright wrote the scenes to the songs, shot the action for real, and let the music handle character, plot and tension at once. Then, in the last act, he takes the music away, and the loss hits harder than any bullet. Choose the device your story runs on, commit to it on page one, and save your biggest scene for the moment you break it.
Is Baby Driver worth watching?
Yes, and more than once. It’s funny, fast, surprisingly sweet and put together with more care than almost any action film of its decade. The music-and-picture work alone is worth the price, and the performances hold up underneath the style.
Watch the opening chase twice, once for the car and once for the song. It’s a 10+ because I can’t name another film that does what this one does half as well. My only quibble is that Wright hasn’t made anything since that comes near it, and that’s a complaint about the rest of his career, which says plenty about this one.
