Night rider

Locke is about a man driving alone at night. Well not entirely alone—he’s the only person in the car, but nearly a dozen others are variously present as voices on the mobile phone that he’s constantly using in the course of his journey. And, as we soon come to understand, the spirit of the lone driver’s dead father is also a living presence, an unseen passenger whose hostile goading persists in the driver’s mind and memory.

But Ivan Locke (played by a quietly fierce Tom Hardy) is driving alone, headed for London on a British motorway, in what gradually emerges as an exceptional kind of mission. Locke is already on the road at the outset, and he’s still on the road (but closing in on his stated destination) at the finish. The main dramatic action is mostly a matter of the lone driver’s increasingly fraught telephone conversations.

At one level, Locke is simply a kind of haunted nighttime journey through a generic 21st century landscape—distinguished only by swirls of electric lights and passing cars and trucks. But, as Locke’s phone conversations gradually reveal, the physical journey is just one of the challenges that this man in the dark is facing. The trip is the extraordinary result of his remarkably decisive response to a deeply personal and somewhat convoluted crisis, and that response contributes to two other crises that require his immediate mid-journey attention.

One of those crises involves family (Locke’s wife and their teenage son). Another has to do with his work (the construction of an exceptionally large skyscraper). And the crisis that takes him to London in the middle of the night seems both totally uncharacteristic and weirdly integral to his own idiosyncratically intense sense of himself.

Writer-director Steven Knight keeps the focus on Hardy/Locke throughout. The drama is interior in more than one sense of the term, but Knight’s script stacks up connections to the exterior world via all those phone calls and crises.

There is a risk of overload in having so much converging on a single protagonist in a mere 85 minutes of screen time, but Knight gains some credibility for his heavily freighted tale by framing it in terms that hover on the borders of realism and expressionist fantasy. And distinctly human dimensions are generated through what we hear in the voices of Locke’s baffled wife, his doting son, a flummoxed assistant named Donal, and a lone woman in London.

Hardy’s performance and Knight’s script combine to make Locke an unexpectedly lively figure of paradox—single-mindedly intense but also mysterious and unpredictable, possessed of moral ferocity and a capacity for great kindness, a ruthlessly honest egotist with an exceptional sense of personal and public responsibility, cold-hearted in matters of principle but much given to unorthodox gestures of romantic sentiment.

He might be a madman in a motorized bubble, and he might also be a kind of existentialist saint, a questing rebel trying to put some distance between himself and the comfortable sentiments of the world that’s receding in his rear-view mirror.