Nicolas Sparks heartthrob … Oscar-nominated character actor … the face that launched a thousand memes. Ryan Gosling can do it all — as long as it’s in front of the camera. Twenty-two years after his screen debut as a Mouseketeer, though, the “Hey Girl” guy is finally floundering in a role: as the new Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish auteur who directed Gosling in the stylish but empty “Drive” and the stupid and execrable “Only God Forgives.”
Gosling’s first turn behind the camera owes a mammoth debt to Refn (and a smaller one to David Lynch). Starring Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan, Matt Smith, Iain De Caestecker and Gosling’s partner Eva Mendes (all wasted here), “Lost River” is little more than Detroit-based ruin porn, an aesthetic exploitation of poverty and hardship punctuated by splashes of neon and blood.