Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / To add up, any contemporary movie about a motorcycle club needs to be deconstructive as well as elegiac. Jeff Nichols meets these demands in his grittily inspired The Bikeriders, based loosely on the story of the Chicago Outlaws MC captured by Danny Lyon in the photographs and interviews that make up his eponymous 1968 book. Some will find the film atmospheric to the point of cliché, and it certainly is self-conscious about the mythical male Americana it is trafficking in. By the same token, it seems nostalgic only in a meta-sense: it elevates not the biker way of life so much as the moment in time when it might have merited idealization or at least refinement, much as Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood imagines, counterfactually, how the Old Hollywood gestalt might have saved Sharon Tate.
The protagonist is the aloof, handsome Benny Cross – a fairly convincing Austin Butler – who earns his reputation as a singularly defiant maverick by outrunning a dozen Chicago squad cars and taking a severe beating for the club’s honor. His girlfriend and then wife Kathy Bauer, whom Jodie Comer plays with a flawless Chicago accent and midwestern vibe, narrates the film through interviews with Lyon. An authentic provincial, she is intuitively aghast but morally vague about biker culture and brotherhood. The scabrous heart of The Bikeriders, though, beats in the chest of club president Johnny Davis, customized to acrid perfection as only Tom Hardy could pull it off.
Johnny makes an honest living as a truck driver that gives him time for his passion: racing motorcycles. The hobby burgeons, outcasts gather, and the Vandals are born. Most at this point are charming rogues adroitly played, like Michael Shannon’s Zipco, a Latvian immigrant outraged that the draft board rejected him for drunkenness, and Damon Herriman’s Brucie, a voice of casual reason. Johnny himself indulges little of the preening menace or outlaw imperiousness of Brando’s Strabler in The Wild One, his only vanities being a greasy DA, his colors, and a cherry-red Harley-Davidson. His voice is quiet and nasal, his accent enigmatic in a way that supplicants might read as ensorcelled. He slouches at bars or picnic tables with Carlings or Blatzes, drawing life from unfiltered cigarettes. He’s laconic to the point of shyness, but Johnny cares about his flock. Anyone can challenge him. The only issue for discussion is fists or knives. It’s a brutal but honest system, and a rather democratic one.
After saving Kathy from being gang-raped at a Vandals party, Johnny senses the countercultural dream of enchanted freedom giving way to wanton depravity. (Jax Teller stands at a similar crossroads in Kurt Sutter’s cultish TV series Sons of Anarchy.) The pain in Johnny’s eyes is truly affecting, as is his entreaty to Benny to take over the club. Johnny’s believes only Benny has the charisma to unify and command what has become an unruly mob, but his thrust goes beyond bromantic. As Kathy observes, Johnny is in awe of Benny’s utter abandon. Johnny understands that what he feels is love – the central plot device is arguably a love triangle – but he can express it only through a gift that Benny declines. Benny saves himself, but he can’t fully shake the dream, however tarnished. The potato-potato-potato of an idling Harley always seems within earshot.
The Bikeriders, written and directed by Jeff Nichols. Distributed by Focus Features (United States) and Universal Pictures (international), 2024.
About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
Given your take, I’ll see it!!!