It was a dark and stormy Drive

“Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.”

This is the first, soul-chilling sentence of James Sallis’ 2005 crime novel Drive, a slim, foot-to-the-floor noir that leaks sweaty palms and bleary-eyed adrenaline all over its 158 cutthroat pages. Drive is a no-nonsense novel starring a no-nonsense machine—the automobile—and all the trouble it revs up for a stunt driver-turned-getaway wheelman.

Thirty thousand auto-related deaths and 2.4 million injuries were recorded in the U.S. in 2009, and when cars aren’t killing us, they are making us fatter faster than anything else, including the fast food culture they helped spawn, says a recent study led by Sheldon Jacobsen at the University of Illinois. And yet nothing can replicate the thrill of being a teenager with your teenaged hands fingering every cool metal ridge on that key and your teenaged brain exploding with the notion that, for the very first time, this key, like the road ahead, is all yours.

For Americans, nothing moves us like a car.

But any cardiac surgeon is likely to say that the human heart never seems more powerful, never more complex or essential, than when she holds its beating mass in her hands. When is the last time you laid hands on your engine? For me, it’s been years.

Today, many have distanced ourselves from the true nature of something on which we so heavily rely. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t be giving these two-ton machines egghead names like Civic, Focus and Prius or far-too-feminine ones like Sienna, Camry and Aura. Somewhere Steve McQueen is terribly disappointed in all of this.

Since car use surged in the past generation, the promises and the unbridled thrill of the automobile have become, for lack of a better word, pedestrian. Car talk today is largely negative, with quips about congestion, sprawl and, by the way, when will they all be electric?

In the 1920s, Herbert Hoover christened a new economic barometer when his campaign promised, “Two cars in every garage.” Now the upwardly mobile and creative classes flock to cities with mass public transit. In the 1950s cars were nicknamed “dream machines,” a hip label only something like an iPad would likely garner now. Then came the Batmobile, the General Lee, the Delorean. Not only were cars more relevant, they were co-stars.

This month, an adaptation of Sallis’ crime novel pulls into theaters to reclaim the car as a star attraction—and a serious one. Fast Five this is not. Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling plays the strong silent type Driver, and Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director of Bronson, commands the camera for this unflinching action thriller.

As Driver carves the streets of Los Angeles, the film reminds audiences that there is danger in this world and wrong turns to be taken. There is risk, and not just in back alleys or dank basements, but around every corner and in the commonplace, too. Often it is there waiting just below the surface or underneath the hood.

Drive debuts Sept. 16.