I can’t pretend to be a car guy. As much as I like ogling beautiful sports cars or even luxury sedans, like many urban millennials I don’t have a vehicle of my own (we’re the worst, right?). So I can’t in good conscience call myself part of that community. Maybe a passing interest in the topic, however, is enough to appreciate Driven: a movie that folds a love of cars into an almost improbable story of male friendship, international business, an FBI sting, and unscrupulous ambition.

Nick Hamm’s film is one of two recent releases about inventor and auto executive John DeLorean. A couple of months ago, Sundance Selects distributed Framing John DeLorean, a documentary with dramatized segments featuring Alec Baldwin as DeLorean. Driven, meanwhile, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last year and then screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (where I saw it) and is just now getting its theatrical release.

Of the two movie treatments, Driven is a more traditional biopic, with a feature-length depiction of the events that came to define DeLorean’s career. We begin with his development and initial sales of the futuristic (for the time) DMC car that was later immortalized in Back to the Future. Just when the company is flying high comes an Icarus-like fall: bad reviews, an economic slump, and poor sales put DeLorean into severe debt. Tragically, these events lead him to try to raise money via a cocaine deal, which turns out to be an entrapment scheme by the FBI.

Hamm’s route into the story isn’t by following DeLorean directly. The audience proxy is an FBI informant named Jim Hoffman (Jason Sudeikis), who moves into DeLorean’s neighbourhood and strikes up a friendship with DeLorean (Lee Pace) and is seduced by the wealth and power of the man famous for designing the Pontiac GTO. As presented by the filmmakers, DeLorean’s fall had less to do with DeLorean’s extreme ambition, and more to do with a friendship that went sour: Hoffman is incentivized to turn on DeLorean when it becomes clear that Hoffman won’t be brought in on the ground floor of the white-hot car company.

As the car magnate, Pace is the core attraction. After playing a similarly intimidating genius named Joe MacMillan on AMC’s retro tech-industry series Halt and Catch Fire, DeLorean feels like a natural choice for the actor. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Pace and Hamm had other “visionaries” in mind as they developed the depiction of DeLorean. In the movie, DMC is put forward by its founders as the Tesla of its day, disrupting the big American brands. Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect; Tesla has largely succeeded, putting cars on the road worldwide, whereas DMC fell apart and left most of its vehicles unsold. And while their personalities are wildly different, John DeLorean possessed a damn-the-torpedoes persistence that Elon Musk would eventually inherit.

Unfortunately, much of the movie around Pace’s performance has a very assembly-line feel. There’s some compelling material in the dynamic between Hoffman and DeLorean, and in the assumptions that Hoffman makes about his friendship that aren’t grounded in reality. Hoffman’s striving to measure up to DeLorean is an echo of DeLorean’s own attempt to be taken seriously by Ford and General Motors. But the screenplay doesn’t make this concept work in a production model sense, feeling overall a little too roughly bolted together.

Nevertheless, Sudeikis and Pace are backed up by a strong supporting cast, especially character-actor stalwarts like Corey Stoll and Judy Greer. Stoll plays Special Agent Benedict Tisa, the lead officer on the DeLorean drug operation, and Greer plays Hoffman’s wife, Ellen. While the DeLorean story provides much of the drama, it’s Greer and Stoll’s freakouts at Sudeikis’s character that shift the movie into the comedy spectrum. One particular exchange that works as its own mini-movie is the psychotic behaviour of two of Hoffman’s criminal associates (Erin Moriarty and Michael Cudlitz), who crash one of DeLorean’s fancy parties in spectacular style. As a result, the mix of tones won’t work for everyone – but if you’re a fan of the actors involved, it won’t be a problem.

The messiness of Hamm’s story may be a side effect of the real history: DeLorean’s life didn’t get a conclusive ending in the way that helps a screenplay. He outlasted the criminal proceedings but spent much of his life fending off other legal challenges over the failure of the company, and in an odd twist, ended up selling a property to Donald Trump to escape bankruptcy, land that became Trump’s New Jersey golf club.

However, I’m not sold on the idea of seeing everything from Hoffman’s perspective.  The approach puts DeLorean on a pedestal that simultaneously hints at what it might have been like in his presence, but also keeps him at an emotional remove. As flawed as Hoffman is, DeLorean is the more interesting figure, and he remains a mystery. These clashing reactions are embodied by the vehicle at the centre of the movie: the result of lots of great ideas, put together in a way that doesn’t quite roar to life.

Driven gets two and a half stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• Erin Moriarty is a real find here - seems like she may hit it big in a few years.

• Pace looks like the most well-preserved 60-year-old I’ve seen in a while.

• If this is your first time seeing Pace in the lead, go back and find Halt and Catch Fire - it’s great.