The first ten minutes of Drive are about as enthralling as filmmaking has gotten this year. We meet Ryan Gosling’s nameless character as he drives through the streets of Los Angeles, listening to the Clippers game and a police scanner. He pulls up to a warehouse and eyes two men, who take off running for the building. They disappear inside, and Gosling sits, waiting, cool as a cucumber. Then we hear what is happening on the police scanner: robbery in progress, shots fired. The police have been dispatched. Gosling looks towards the door, impatient, but never anxious. Then we see one of the men running out, dashing for the car. The chase is on.

In Drive’s opening sequence, director Nicolas Winding Refn (interviewed here) sets in play the essential tonal duality that drives the entirety of his film: a tension between normality and anxiety. The soundtrack of the chase is dominated by the broadcast of the Clippers game, the scanner, and muted sounds of the car’s interior. Much of the action takes place not on screen, but over the police scanner. More thrilling than any high speed moments are the tense standoffs at intersections. Refn has created a car chase in which, at times, everything is still. Watching it all is excruciating and exciting. When it is over, we are breathless, and it is hard not to see Ryan Gosling’s character as one of the most dazzling, sexy, and cool cats to hit the screen. And yet Gosling did little more than grip a wheel and chew on a toothpick.

Gosling is quickly emerging as one of his generation’s great talents, and Drive is a showcase for everything that makes him special. Here Gosling plays the nameless driver-for-hire, a stunt actor by day who earns extra cash by being hired out to various goons at night to provide getaway services. He is the steely, gutsy, greasy Los Angeles version of Clint Eastwood’s man with no name from Sergio Leone’s westerns. Only there is something tender about Gosling which allows him, unlike early Eastwood, to flip-flop between the steely brute and teenage lover.

That flip-flop is basically Drive’s central plot. The driver’s new neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan) is a beautiful, wounded single mother whom Gosling’s character soon befriends and falls in love with. Irene’s husband is in jail, and driver is a model surrogate father and steadfast partner. Dressed in Drive’s bubble gum style – from the Sixteen Candles-esque pink script credits to the pounding, eighties-inspired electronic soundtrack – Drive sets up a sticky, high-octant tale of infatuation. And the relationship, retrained like Drive’s chases, is never sexually explicit, yet fecund and sensuous. This makes the first hour of Drive something with the appeal of a music video that sustains its seductive attraction far beyond the three minute MTV attention span.

Teenage love is a volatile thing, and as the relationship blooms it is necessarily threatened. Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac) enters the scene after he is released from jail. But it is not a lover’s feud that ignites Drive’s third act mayhem, but the gangster baggage Standard brings with him. Inside the pen, Standard indebted himself to some hairy characters, and on the outside, their associates come to collect the debt. In Blue Valentine Gosling showed his capacity for psychotic extremes, and he draws upon the same bleeding black-heartedness here, sliding from the mumble-mouthed sweet guy to a vicious attack dog – a black angel. The film becomes an out-of-control vehicle careening down a highway; you know the only way it will stop is in a spectacular crash.

With Drive, Refn has created a stylish, intoxicating film that is surely to be a break out this season. It is a meticulously crafted, wonderful balanced film, and it holds its various elements – a sense of suspense, romantic tension, pulpy gangster subplots, Scorsese-like violence – with tight reigns, keeping coherent what 95 percent of other moviemakers couldn’t keep at bay.

Still, there is something disappointing about the Dick Tracy right turn the film takes. While always a pulpy, graphic novel of a movie, something of Drive’s perfume is lost with the arrival of the wrinkle-faced mobsters. A straight-from-Goodfellas knife bludgeoning in a pizza parlor announces a sharp break, not only in tone, but in genre. It is like a Morrissey song directed by Quentin Tarantino. Delicate hearts bleed.