‘The Bikeriders’ Review
Everyone wants to be part of something.
THE BIKERIDERS IS A PLEASING LOOK BACK to an age when Americans had proper hooligans to look up to like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Entranced by his devil-may-care attitude and hypnotized by the cacophonous rattling of his motorcycle, the married-with-kids Johnny (Tom Hardy) decides, more or less on a whim, that the motorcycle gang life is for him.
And so he sets out to build one. We meet the Vandals Motorcycle Club some years after their creation, with Benny (Austin Butler) taking a shovel to the back of his head for refusing to take off his colors. Kathy (Jodie Comer) is recounting the story to Danny Lyon (Mike Faist), who will go on to publish a photography book about the real-life Vandals (the Outlaws Motorcycle Club) on which this film is based, and what jumps out about Kathy—and, later, Johnny and the members of the gang—is her accent.
The Bikeriders is bounded not just by the years of 1965 and 1973, when Lyon’s interviews took place, but within the amorphous geographic unit known as the American Midwest. I wouldn’t dare attempt to place precisely where Comer’s or Hardy’s accents hail, but it doesn’t matter that much; as Hardy himself has said, “accent work is . . . about conjuring an atmosphere from a place which is authentic.” And their accents provide an idea of a place, just as the vintage automobiles and the black-and-white television sets and the slicked-back hair provide an idea of an age.
One thing writer-director Jeff Nichols has always excelled at is sketching out an idea of a place and people, particularly places and people that are frequently ignored by studio filmmakers. The brawling half-brothers of Shotgun Stories (2007) in Arkansas; Take Shelter’s (2011) working-class family in Ohio juggling incipient mental illness and a daughter’s deafness; the poverty of Arkansas communities along the Mississippi River in Mud (2012); a Texas cult and the Lovings of Loving v. Virginia in Midnight Special and Loving, respectively (both of which were released in 2016).
What The Bikeriders captures most cleanly is a sense of . . . boredom. Johnny starts the Vandals because, hey, it’s something to do. His friends join up because, as one member puts it, “Everyone wants to be part of something.” It’s not a criminal gang in the sense that we often think about motorcycle gangs. They’re not running drugs. They’re not doing hits. They just want to hang out with each other and with each other’s old ladies. They want to talk about their bikes, about the carburetors, about putting together something unique.
But they’re not quite as harmless as Johnny would like to make out. After Benny takes that beating, the gang rolls into the town where it happened, finds the bar frequented by the guys who nearly took off Benny’s foot, and burns it down, sitting there all the while, cops and firemen on the side, afraid to stop the blaze. The bigger the Vandals get, the more hard-edged folks join up—Vietnam vets with drug problems, guys looking for reasons to get in a fight.
Vietnam isn’t quite unmentioned—at one point Zipco (a greasy-haired, wild-eyed Michael Shannon) complains about getting turned down when he tried to get drafted, his sense of aimlessness eventually leading him into the arms of Johnny—but it’s a specter looming over everything else. Things are changing in America, and not in ways that feel good for anyone.
The Bikeriders is a little ramshackle; in its structure and its unwieldy cast of supporting characters, Nichols’s film occasionally calls to mind Goodfellas. And though it never quite hits Scorsese’s classic’s highs, the complement of actors in this picture is as good as I’ve seen in quite some time. Butler practically smolders on the screen, and he’s given much more to do with this movie than as Feyd Rautha in Dune: Part Two. Comer is all wide-eyed Midwestern fussiness, both loving of Benny and frustrated by his inability to leave the gang and be with her full-time.
Tom Hardy is Tom Hardy, and while I would not describe his role as strictly comedic, he nevertheless inspired several peals of laughter from my Thursday afternoon audience. And there are killer supporting turns from Shannon, Boyd Holbrook, Damon Herriman, and Mike Faist (who crushed it in Challengers), as well as Happy Anderson and Michael Abbott Jr. (who we just saw in last month’s The Last Stop in Yuma County). The Bikeriders might not quite be great, but it is incredibly hypnotic thanks to the stellar work by a stellar cast.