BabyDriver

In “Baby Driver,” the director Edgar Wright is out to show you a most excellent time. He’s never been one of those filmmakers who expect you to be blinded by the bright sheen of his résumé, which includes comical genre rethinks like the zombie flick “Shaun of the Dead” and the cop caper “Hot Fuzz.” Mr. Wright works for your love, hard enough that you notice the whirring machinery if perhaps not the strain. He wants it easy and breezy, although mostly he wants it cool, whether the latest means to his end, Baby (Ansel Elgort), is smooth-moving like Gene Kelly or burning rubber like Steve McQueen.

A genre ride with a rebuilt engine and a sweet paint job, “Baby Driver” is all about movement and sometimes stillness and how a beautiful man looks (feels, seems, is) even better when he’s in glorious, syncopated, restless motion. The first time you see Baby — that’s his handle, which suits Mr. Elgort, with his angelic face and young man’s lissomeness — he’s in the driver’s seat, where he belongs. The car doesn’t look like much, just a cherry-red box with doors and a spoiler. Like us, Baby is waiting for the action to start, seemingly sealed off from the outside world with his dark sunglasses and earbuds.

This is how Baby rolls, with shifting gears, pumping feet and thumping tunes, and how Mr. Wright rolls here as well. There’s a story, sure, about Baby getting in and out of trouble while finding love and money. He doesn’t have much of an inner life, but he has skills, a heavy back story and a kindly foster father, Joe (CJ Jones, who helps give the movie its faint heartbeat), a deaf invalid with whom he signs. Baby also has tinnitus, which he quells with music; mostly, he has killer timing and gracefully elastic, reactive physicality that suggests Mr. Wright has put in time with the films of Jacques Tati.

That’s wonderful company to keep and to learn from, especially when you’re as cleverly attentive a student as Mr. Wright. Baby drives hard, fast, tight and seemingly oh so effortlessly, spinning wheels across pavement like a Russian Olympian on ice. In the eye-tickling opener — a wham, bam, we’ll-take-the-cash-ma’am heist — Baby peels out in that red box (a souped-up Subaru) and motors into one of those warped Road Runner chases that builds momentum with near escapes, not-even-close winking and the twangy throbbing of “Bellbottoms,” from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, a group once unforgettably described by the critic Robert Christgau as “avant-travestying da blooze.”

“Baby Driver” isn’t avant-travestying; it’s a pop pastiche par excellence, crammed with cubistic action; glowering and golly-gee types (played by the seductive likes of Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González and Lily James); and an encyclopedia of cinematic allusions, all basted in wall-to-wall tuneage. At times, the whole thing spins like a tribute album, a collection of covers of varying quality: diner yaks à la Quentin Tarantino, Godardian splashes of color. When it works, the allusions give you a contact high, like when a friend turns you on to a favorite movie. At other times, Mr. Wright’s pleasure veers into the self-satisfied, and all that love feels smothering, near-bullying, like bro-cinephilia in extremis.

In the main, it’s easy to go with Mr. Wright’s flow, partly because he rarely steps off the gas. It’s just go go go with an occasional stop for coffee or an amusingly testy sit-down with Baby’s shadowy boss, Doc, one of those all-seeing, all-knowing criminal mystics whom Kevin Spacey gives ominous ooze and a daddy’s mad (maybe nuts) indoor voice. Doc has something on Baby, who’s been forced into a life of bad behavior and company. That Baby has had no choice but to drive along plays as knowingly implausible as it sounds. But heroic fatalism and unwilling villainy remain enduring cinematic tropes, including in gangster movies, even if it means holding convention over complexity.

There’s much to enjoy in “Baby Driver,” including the satisfactions of genuine cinematic craft and technique, qualities that moviegoers can no longer take for granted. The edits snap, the colors pop and the cinematography serves the performances and the story rather than embalming them in an emptily showy, self-regarding directorial conceit. The emotions are mostly rote and cold, but the car chases are hot — at once fluid, geometric and rhythmic, with a beat Baby carries with him out of the car whether he’s on the stroll or the run. (The director of photography is Bill Pope; the editors are Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos; and the stunt coordinator is Darrin Prescott, leading an army.)

“Baby Driver” is so good that you want it to be better and go deeper, for it to put down its guns (or at least hold them differently) and transcend its clichés and cine-quotes so it can rocket out of the genre safe box into the cosmic beyond where craft and technique transform into art. That’s admittedly somewhat of a greedy complaint, particularly given how much Mr. Wright does right and that he clearly wants you levitating out of your seat. It’s difficult to carp about a director who wants to please the audience this much (instead of, say, the franchise suits). At the same time, you have to wonder where Mr. Wright might go if he cut loose from his influences and let a little feeling muss up his form.

Baby Driver

Rated R for gun and vehicular violence. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes.