never Miss a beat

“Re-al human be-ing…” Off to see Drive? Get the bus. It’s the sort of pulp movie you strut out of like Steve McQueen. “And a re-al he-ro…” Gloves on, keys out, toothpick ready, the saccharine refrain from College’s A Real Hero circling round your head for hours like a racecar at Daytona. “Re-al human be-ing…” Forget the LA Storm Drain System, we’re all real human beings here with cars. Let’s be heroes, race back home, find out what the hell this song is, then HIGHTAIL it down the M25.

Drive had Instant Cult Classic written in neon pink allover it. It’s a pop culture wet dream, every element hyper-stylised, almost to the point of parody; neither filmed nor set in the ‘80s, the Drive ‘80s looks and sounds better now than it did in the actual ‘80s. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s all down to Ryan Gosling. Pick a day this year, walk into a cinema, there will be a trailer – or two – starring the demigod who escaped unscathed after singing in Blue Valentine. 2011 is definitely the year of RyGo.

But in Drive, a film of few words, it’s the hero’s co-star creeping in to steal the limelight. Front-loaded by a triple assault of uber addictive synth-heavy pop delights, all featuring feminine vocals wispier than Kelly McGillis’s hair in Top Gun, it’s the soundtrack – a character in its own right – that’s doing the leg work. The Cliff Martinez score that follows juxtaposes fragile, bittersweet melodies with metallic, industrial throbs; seamlessly shifting between a lurking danger, a sense of loneliness, sinister ultraviolence and the pain of unrequited love smoother than Senna on a gearbox.

“When things are left subject to interpretation, music becomes much more important,” Martinez tells me. “I was trying to use the music to magnify that contrast between beauty and darkness.” Gosling’s puppy dog eyes may be enough to excuse some Highway Code violations, but they won’t validate a nameless loner about to hammer a nail into a man’s head. Retro in a thoroughly modern way, it’s the soundtrack that makes both Drive and Gosling so brutally masculine, and yet so sensitively effeminate. Without that there’d be no hero; just a human being.