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.

Hollywood has solved the prickly matter of having to hire pesky 40-somethings for 50-something roles. With a little Philip K Dickery and the conception of time as currency, they can simply cast Olivia Wilde as a 50-year-old grandmother. It’s easy when you know how.

In such a world, your morning latte would be priced not in pounds or dollars, but minutes. 99-cent stores become 99-second stores. Every man, woman and child is allotted 26 years at birth: 25 years in which they age, 1 in which they wait to die – a ticking clock digitised upon their arms for everyone to see. When you work, you reclaim a few hours in pay. Try your hand at the casino, and suddenly you’ve lost those and a few more besides. The daily rhythms of life aren’t so different to our own, except theirs would promote more than just a vague notion of a finite future. At 5 hours a night, a stay in a motel takes you demonstrably closer to death. That car you always dreamt of? 59 years before tax. When time is money, you do a lot of running.

The society of ‘In Time’ is divided into zones: the poor in one, the rich in another. Think of them as tax brackets for the time rich. Guarding the borders are Timekeepers. One bright sunny morning, a body is found floating in the river downtown. Raymond Leon has seen dozens of cases like this. A wealthy corpse looks like any other, except they have more reason than most to wind up as such. This particular soul once had a century of time, and now he has none. The only lead is a nearby surveillance camera, which captured a young man fleeing the scene.

Will Salas has always lived one day at a time. He was born into the ghettos of Dayton, where crime is rife among the poor and desperate. Out drinking one night, he meets a 105-year-old who looks barely a day over 25. When the city’s mob comes looking, Will ferries him to a desolate warehouse by the river. Holed up for the night, Will learns the truth. Far from being a precious commodity, time is plentiful enough to serve the needs of everybody. Yet when immortality itself is for sale, the rich choose instead to horde it for themselves. As Will sleeps, the stranger gifts him his remaining time, before heading out to a bridge to see the sunrise. Moments later, his body tumbles into its lifeless journey upstream.

Putting 2 and 2 together has never been the forte of big screen detectives, which is why Raymond gives chase, and Will has something to run from. That merry dance takes them to the wealthy district of New Greenwich, where geriatric opulence is the norm. Age has no meaning there. At an extravagant party, Will meets the young daughter of a wealthy businessman. She feels suffocated by her father; conscious that his endless pursuit of time has left the act of living a concern only of the working class.

They set off together, of course. You suspected they might. That they have bigger plans than love and daring adventure, maybe less so. In Time is an allegory for capitalism itself. Runaway inflation, the threat of imminent collapse; the treachery of socialism. Wrapping that message in the dystopian shell of Blade Runner helps the medicine go down, as does recruiting Amanda Seyfried with her rolling wardrobe of ever-shorter skirts. Justin Timberlake, meanwhile – so perfect in The Social Network – is finally undone by his limitations. When he cocks his gun to gruffly declare “I’m gonna make them pay“, it brings to mind a Mickey Mouse veteran playing hoodlum. It’s an appropriate enough comparison, since, by the time it ends, In Time has become a sort of modern-day Thelma and Louise. Not without charm, these glamorous bank robbers; bandits of time inequity.