“Don’t feed me any more lines from Monsters Inc. It pisses me off.”

Justin’s rating: Don’t you miss sharing music via earbuds? What about carefully curating a playlist that you own?

Justin’s review: What initially drew me to Baby Driver was a clip where I saw that the main character almost exclusively listened to an iPod as he went about his day and heists. I love my own iPods, especially in this horrid age of streaming and algorithms, and so I did a phantom high-five to see a kindred soul.

But Baby’s (Ansel Elgort) iPod is more than just fashion, as we gradually discover. It’s a timing mechanism for his action scenes. It drowns out the constant tinnitus he’s had since he was a kid. It connects him to his long-dead mother. And it’s a catalyst for his natural grace.

It doesn’t hurt that it’s also cool as all get out.

Baby is a genuinely nice — and quiet — guy who lives a life of extreme juxtapositions. He’s an attentive caretaker of a deaf older man, he loves to remix soundbites that he records, he treats the world as his own dance studio, and he’s falling for the stunning waitress at the local diner (Debora, played by Lily James) who looks not a little like Shelly from Twin Peaks and sings like an angel.

Yet Baby’s also been pulled into the criminal underworld, presumably against his will, to be a getaway driver for a number of nasty people including Doc (Kevin Spacey), Bats (Jamie Foxx), Darling (Eiza Gonzalez), and Buddy (Jon Hamm). “One last job” never seems to hold fast, even when things get more and more dangerous from both the criminals and law enforcement.

He clearly hates this second part yet is holding back from breaking free under his own steam — until the good things in his life are threatened, that is, and he finds the will to use his talents to fight back against the underworld and do what he can to protect the innocents caught up along the way. They’ve got guns, he’s got cars.

I’d been dying to see Edgar Wright’s (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) heist flick for a while now, and now that I’ve gotten to behold it, I can say that it lived up to my expectations and more. Wright’s slick and dynamic style works so well for a heist flick with a strong dose of rhythm and thrilling driving sequences.

There are so many amazing scenes that marry arresting visuals and music, a waltz that’s genuinely artistic in a way that I forgot movies could be. There are full scenes done entirely in sign language and subtitles that made me pay more attention to what was being said than normal. Even the slight scars on Baby’s face are a story of the childhood crash that took his mother away from him and sent him on a path to crime.

I can’t say enough good things about Baby Driver. Your average movie is lucky if it has one good idea and a good scene tucked into it. This one is jam-packed with both. I was on the edge of my seat with the tension of Baby and Debora’s situation while also grinning at this flick’s style and charm — and, of course, its fantastic tunes.