For Fans of Adam Driver

Noah Baumbach's 2019 film earns its place in the canon not through spectacle but through the sheer fidelity of its observation. Driver and Scarlett Johansson play a marriage disintegrating in slow motion, and both actors find a register that is neither hero nor villain. The film's argument is that love and injury can coexist in the same sentence, and Driver's performance in the hallway argument sequence is among the finest five minutes of acting in recent American cinema. It does what the best relationship films always do: it makes you recognize something you did not have words for before.

The Skywalker Saga's third trilogy is uneven to put it charitably, but Driver's Ben Solo is its legitimate achievement. He builds a character whose internal conflict is credible from the first scene, and the tension between his rage and his longing for belonging gives the films more dramatic weight than anything in the scripts. His arc across three films is the closest the sequels come to the mythic seriousness of the original trilogy, and his final act in The Rise of Skywalker lands because he has earned it across hundreds of minutes of patient character work.

Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film gives Driver almost no plot and no arc in the conventional sense: a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, writes poems, walks his dog, drinks one beer at the bar. The entire film is Driver listening. He listens to passengers, to his partner, to the city. It is a performance of radical attention, and it is the one that most clearly shows what separates him from actors who rely on external event to generate feeling. If Marriage Story is Driver at full volume, Paterson is Driver at a whisper, and the whisper is equally convincing.

Michael Mann's 2023 film about Enzo Ferrari is a useful stress test: can Driver carry a prestige period piece in a language that is not his own, playing a real historical figure, opposite a script that is working out whether Ferrari is a visionary or simply someone who used beauty as a cover for ruthlessness? The answer is yes. Driver makes Ferrari's contradictions feel lived-in rather than written, and the film belongs to the long tradition of Mann protagonists who are very good at what they do and pay for it in everything else.