Anti-Hero

After Drive came out, its director Nicolas Winding Refn gave some truly memorable interviews, which I encourage you to read. They’re colorful, offbeat. He’s a Danish director who hadn’t intersected much with Hollywood before the movie, so some of the anecdotes are tender. It’s clear he bonded with Ryan Gosling. Refn, who doesn’t drive, had Gosling drive him around L.A at night so Gosling could show him the locations from the book the movie is (loosely) based on. The cast lived together during the shoot, Refn told CinemaScope. With that context, the oft-repeated story of how the director let Gosling pick out his own hero car for the movie makes a little more sense. 

Gosling was showing Refn a version of L.A. that was real to him, not as part of a method-acting process. You get a sense, reading all of these interviews, that Refn also developed a fondness for the city that goes beyond its much-mythologized onscreen appearances. So Refn made a movie about contrasts. About the silent Driver’s eery and instantaneous switch from empathetic to ruthless. Al Brooks, the comedian, as an unsettling gangster. About the glamorous, twinkling city’s dark corners. 

And the car. 

I can think of a lot of reasons why the 1973 Chevelle Malibu is worth whatever Bonhams will sell it for in Paris later this month, but the most important one is that it’s cool.

It’d be easy to think of the Chevelle somewhat cynically, as an engineered experience to help burnish the authenticity of the movie. But listening to the actor and director return to the same themes in various interviews, it’s clear that the Chevelle is intended as a very atypical hero car. It’s a metaphor for Gosling (the person, not the Driver character) and Refn (who, to be clear, may not have ever been in the car himself) of the connection the two developed on those night drives, bonding with each other and the city itself.

With all that said, with all those intangibles baked into the car’s backstory, it’s worth stating that the car itself is actually cool in an effortless way. This isn’t now, or is it likely to be in the future, the sort of car that enthusiasts actively seek out—unless there’s an underlying meaning, a sentimental attachment. That gives it an underground, natural sort of appeal. Its potential isn’t obvious. It’s not even a highly recognized sleeper. It’s unusual but not anonymous. And it has plenty of room under the hood for something absolutely legendary.

The car Bonhams is offering, along with the other two cars that appeared in the movie, sports a simple, reliable, inexpensive, and perfectly adequate Chevy 350 and three-speed auto combination with only a four-barrel carb and some long-tube headers to give it a little extra zip. Unless a post-Gosling owner has messed with it, of course. Again, that’s fine. Smallblocks make good power when they’re done right, and just like a ‘73 Chevelle, they’re affordable.

Bonhams estimates it’ll sell for between $70,000 and $90,000, which is a fair bit of change for a ‘73 Chevelle but not a lot for a movie car with this kind of offbeat cool factor. I would also be lying to you if the idea of cruising around in it at night, Moroder on the tape deck, doesn’t sound a hell of a lot better than therapy.