Adam Driver’s appeal as an actor has been mischaracterised. He’s a very modern movie star

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy In spite of my never having seen a recent Star Wars film, I must confess that my absolute favourite line-reading by two-time Academy Award nominee Adam Driver – lest we forget, an idiosyncratic deliverer of lines par excellence across the board – comes from an SNL skit in which he reprises his character from those movies, Kylo Ren. “Adam will call me about a movie three movies ago,” his long-term collaborator and friend Noah Baumbach once observed, bewildered, in a video promoting 2019’s Marriage Story, “and say, ‘I think I know now how to do that scene,’ even though as far as I know we can’t go back.” “Adam Driver,” any anxious person might think, watching Driver laugh and then shift uncomfortably in his seat as Baumbach says this, “c’est moi.” This persistent tension is, above all else, the quality that helps make Driver such a singular performer. The film’s plot, as one might expect from one adapted from a famously “unfilmable” Don DeLillo novel, sprawls and lurches, and its tonal shifts are not entirely successful: it is by turns a deadpan comedy, a lightweight consumerist satire, a lurid Spielbergian apocalypse movie, and a visual pastiche of the Eighties that – by virtue of resembling something more like Napoleon Dynamite than the actual 1980s – manages to look perversely as if it was made in 2009. “To be so enormous,” Driver breathes, his diction suggestive of the kind of terrible epiphanic moment that is apt to ruin a life, “then to die.” When I said that Driver’s Gladney, like the actor who portrays him, “is manically obsessed with his own failures”, it was true largely because there is no greater and more inevitable failure than death.