About Drive My Car
A widowed stage director travels to Hiroshima to mount a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya and is assigned, over his objections, a quiet young woman as his driver. Adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story but pulling in two more for ballast, Hamaguchi turns three hours of long highway drives, rehearsal-room repetitions, and a final snowbound monologue into a pilgrimage about grief, listening, and the parts of marriage that go on speaking after the marriage is over.
Released in 2021 and running a tight 2h 59m, Drive My Car sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated NR and presented in Japanese, with English subtitles at participating venues. Read a contemporary review — useful before you book a ticket.
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Ryusuke Hamaguchi belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Drive My Car is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Ryusuke Hamaguchi currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow the festival circuit notes from the criticism outlets linked at the bottom of this page.
Cast
The principal cast — Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Reika Kirishima — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception. Cast notes and credits are useful for tracking through other adjacent indie work.
Where to watch Drive My Car
Currently playing in 12 US cities across our directory. The deepest scheduling is in:
- San Francisco, CA — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Seattle, WA — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Fredonia, NY — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Sioux Center, IA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Bethesda, MD — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Saint Louis Park, MN — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Rio Rancho, NM — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Ann Arbor, MI — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Las Vegas, NM — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Brooklyn, NY — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Valparaiso, IN — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Highlandtown, MD — booked at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory, or browse the next seven days of showtimes for last-minute additions.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Drive My Car is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 59m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas listed in the schedule above are the venues currently doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition. Programmer notes are sometimes the fastest way to triangulate which other films share a sensibility.