Barbie Movie Music Video Reveals How Ryan Gosling's Ken Song Sequence Came Together

Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" is the kind of movie that makes you wonder "How did they do that?" a dozen different times over the course of its runtime. The box office hit of the summer is chock full of movie magic, from its Dream House sets decked out to the most minute detail with real Mattel merch made life-size, to its practically achieved transition montage to the real world. Now, one of its biggest sequences — the chart-climbing musical extravaganza "I'm Just Ken" — is finally getting the behind-the-scenes treatment with an official music video from Atlantic Records.

The "I'm Just Ken" video follows in the tradition of great tie-in music videos past, in that it basically doubles as a featurette showing how the film's biggest sequence came together. If you want to see the layers of music, choreography, vocals, and more that went into the scene, this is the video for you. If you just want to cheer on some Kens and sing along to Ryan Gosling's surprise return to the world of song and dance, this is also the video for you.

There are plenty of great moments packed into this nearly 4-minute video. Intercut scenes show the utterly stacked musical lineup that made the song come together, from Wolfgang Van Halen and Slash on guitar (no, really) to Foo Fighters' Josh Freese (whose bleach-blonde hair has already made some fans confuse him for Gosling in a quick video clip) on drums, per Entertainment Weekly. At one point, Gerwig claps her hand over her mouth in surprised delight when Gosling rips off his fur coat to reveal the outfit underneath. At another, the Kens arrive on the beach via boats that turn out to be moving on a tiny track towards the cameras. Behind them, crew members throw tennis balls at them as the fight sequence heats up.

"I'm Just Ken" is a perfectly melodramatic ballad about the Kens trying to live their truth while trapped in the patriarchy they've created, but it's also an excuse for the movie to go full-blown classic Hollywood. The black shirt-clad dance sequence between Gosling's Ken and Simu Liu's calls to mind both "Grease" and the stage-set musical movie extravaganzas of the 1930s. The music video focuses a lot on this scene, showing nearly an entire run-through of Gosling's choreography practice — first opposite a stand-in dancer, and later with scene-stealer Ncuti Gatwa and fellow Ken Scott Evans, who both give him a little smooch on the cheek. Take that, horse patriarchy!

If you haven't caught it yet, "Barbie" is still in theaters.