To hear the roar of the engine, you’d think a war was coming. Drive is both a throwback to, and reinvention of, the muscle car movies of the 60s and 70s. Bullitt, most obviously, but others as well: The Driver, and American Graffiti. The lead is a revival of The Man With No Name, who once occupied Sergio Leone as this does Nicholas Refn. He has confidence enough to allow the material to breathe, free of CGI or excessive interference. Sometimes it’s enough just to wait it out. You don’t see many movies like that.

The driver has no name, nor inclination to talk. He is what he does. By day he works both as a mechanic and a daring Hollywood stunt driver. By night, a pedal-heavy wheelman who deals in absolutes. He gives the same speech to every prospective employer. “I give you five minutes when you get there. Anything happens in that five minutes and I’m yours, no matter what. Anything a minute either side of that and you’re on your own. I don’t carry a gun. I drive.”

And drive he does. I don’t just mean figuratively. He really does drive, which in itself is a nostalgic quirk in an era of illusionary chase sequences. That Ryan Gosling accomplishes it with the flair of Steve McQueen and the cool of Clint Eastwood is even more surprising. The camera sits with him as he awaits a pick-up. We see him carefully put on his leather driving gloves, gripping the wheel with purpose. He never flinches. When a job goes wrong, he calmly slots in behind a police car and guides his passengers home. Another time he steps out in the middle of a chase and, in one smooth motion, turns his jacket inside out, pulls on a baseball cap, and disappears into the crowd. A criminal chameleon, cool as you like.

At night, Los Angeles flickers with the luminescence of Tron. The camera sweeps over towering city blocks to the pulsing beat of a synth soundtrack recalling Kavinsky and College. We pan down, to the city streets and the winding roads, the arid back lots that play host to night-time reverie. Drive is more aesthetic idea than strong narrative, but what an aesthetic it is. There is something here, some combination of sound and light and old-fashioned workmanship, that make the film a compelling vacuum.

Though in no other way similar, it’s a feeling I last felt during Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation: that of a hazy, neon daydream. Even when the sun is out, events seem to occur outside of time. Sometimes there is slow motion, other times a more kinetic scene emerges. The feeling is the same in either case. When the driver begins seeing his next-door neighbour, a vulnerable mother with a young son, there is an electricity, but they don’t act on it. Not in the way you’ve come to expect. There are no love scenes between he and Carey Mulligan. Just occasional moments in which she looks at him, and he looks at her. Hands come together, and they share the silence. A little smile, perhaps.

I’m conscious of having said almost nothing of the plot. What would you like to know? That he gets involved with an ex-convict, who owes a lot of money to the wrong kind of people? That, in helping, he betrays the mania behind his calm exterior? There are fragments of a crime thriller here, but the plot is secondary to the cinematography and effortless cool. Indeed, it’s only when the film pretends otherwise that it falters. Anytime the movie has Gosling pick up a gun, it has failed. Anytime he breaks from a kiss to kick some guys skull in, it has failed. He is not Patrick Bateman or Max Cady. He’s cooler than that, and when Drive flirts with B-movie imagery, it loses some fundamental part of itself.

Such jarring escapades are nearly ruinous. This is not a movie that needs to see a woman’s head blown off in a sleezy bathroom. It isn’t Hobo With a Shotgun, and ought not to try. Driver is at his most effective when an enigma, and it is only towards the end that the film effectively marries his distinctive style to the horror within. There it is, in a symphony of violence, a play of shadow and darkness in which the film learns to choose menace over comedy, and is so redeemed.