Movie review: Action-filled ‘Baby Driver’ moves like a dream

Like the cars the main character favors and the music he listens to, "Baby Driver" is sleek, fast, propulsive and a wild ride.

Ansel Elgort plays Baby — that's his name; "B-A-B-Y," as he tells baristas and anyone else who needs to know — who likes to drive fast and listen to loud music. The music, his boss Doc (Kevin Spacey) explains, is to drown out the tinnitus, the "hum in his drum," that he's suffered since his parents were killed in a car accident (with him in the back seat) when he was 7.

Baby has been stealing and driving cars "since he could see over the dash," Doc explains. One of the cars he stole was Doc's Mercedes, loaded with contraband. Because of that, Baby has been repaying Doc by acting as getaway driver on heists. Doc orchestrates the heists around Atlanta, with different crews each time.

The movie opens with a perfectly executed bank robbery, an adrenaline-pumping 6 minutes of cinema heaven that demonstrates how Baby uses songs on his iPod to time his driving. The job — with tough couple Buddy (Jon Hamm) and Darling (Eiza Gonzalez), and uptight gunman Griff (Jon Bernthal) — is Baby's next-to-last before his debt to Doc is paid, and the kid is determined to give up the criminal life when he's square.

Before the last job, though, he meets Debora (Lily James), a lovely diner waitress. Romance begins with the first cup of coffee and a shared love of music. After the last job — a somewhat chaotic affair with the violently manic Bats (Jamie Foxx) and a couple dim-bulb thugs (played by Flea and Lanny Joon) — Baby takes Debora out for a fancy dinner to celebrate his freedom.

But at the restaurant he sees Doc, who isn't about to let his "lucky charm" get away and will use Debora's safety as leverage. It all comes down to the biggest heist of all, with Doc assembling an all-star team — Buddy, Darling and Bats — with Baby driving the car.

Writer-director Edgar Wright is a master of genre filmmaking — consider the loving treatment of horror in "Shaun of the Dead" and comic-book culture in "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" — and he polishes the heist scenes here until they gleam. He plays with every archetype, from Debora's innocent damsel to Buddy and Darling's Bonnie-and-Clyde act. And he choreographs every scene to the soundtrack, compiling a dizzying variety of songs for every beat of the action.

Wright also casts the movie deftly. Elgort ("The Fault in Our Stars") is a strong silent center of the hurricane of action around him, and his chemistry with the lovely James ("Cinderella") energizes the movie. Spacey oozes quiet menace as the crime boss Doc, and Hamm, Gonzalez and Foxx each get their moments to shine.

Some of Wright's moves are a stop short of perfection — the characters are sometimes a bit generic, and a few of the needle-drop song cues are too on-the-nose — but those are minor quibbles. When "Baby Driver" gets its engines revved up, it owns the road.

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'Baby Driver'

A getaway driver has one last job before he can quit in this hyperstylized, music-driven crime thriller.

Where • Theaters everywhere.

When • Opens Wednesday, June 28.

Rating • R for violence and language throughout.

Running time • 113 minutes.