'The Bikeriders' is Another Gorgeous Jeff Nichols Joint That Feels Somehow Incomplete
No one else makes imperfect films so watchable.
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Jeff Nichols is an “interesting” director, a descriptor I don’t use this way very often. He makes “good” movies, broadly speaking (Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special, Loving, all of which he also wrote), without a dud in the bunch, though I haven’t wholeheartedly loved any of them. Yet even when I leave feeling slightly unfulfilled, I keep going back for more. His latest, The Bikeriders is no different; a film with mesmerizing textures, memorable performances, and an unmatched ability to evoke a sense of place, that still seems to lack an extra conceptual gear that would take it from good to great.
The Bikeriders is Nichols’ adaptation of Danny Lyon’s 1968 book of pictures and interviews of the same name. If there’s one glaring flaw of the movie version, it’s that Nichols puts Lyon in the story without really making him a character. The Bikeriders opens framed around an interview, with movie Lyon (played by Mike Faist, recently of Challengers fame) interviewing Kathy (Jodie Comer), about how she came to be the old lady of an outlaw biker. Comer, like all of the actors in The Bikeriders to varying degrees, makes a meal out of the nasally honks and quacks that characterize the greater-Chicago-area accent. Nothing inspires actors like an opportunity to cosplay tackiness.
We flash back to the pivotal evening in the early-to-mid-1960s, when the once-respectable Kathy, wearing white Levis and a tasteful top, ends up in a pool hall filled with hairy wild men during a meeting of the Vandals motorcycle club. The leering bike boys proposition and catcall her, all the usual stuff, and she’s just about to storm out in disgust when she spies Benny, a fluffy bronze mound of voluminous hair and pillowy lips played by Austin Butler that no woman can resist. Butler acts every scene like he’s moving in slow-motion where everything around him is regular speed, like a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic of James Dean. That sounds like more of an insult than it is; Butler accurately, indelibly conveys the character of Benny, an inscrutable human wood carving who looks so good lighting a cigarette that everyone around him imbues him with something more, mostly to his detriment.
Benny soon runs off Kathy’s boyfriend in problematic fashion, sitting in front of her house all night smoking cigarettes and just staring, smolderingly, until her boyfriend finally figures that he doesn’t need this shit and leaves of his own accord (the most sane person in the story). Kathy would’ve run Benny off too, if only her better judgement hadn’t been drowned out by her shrieking loins. There’s also a coercive element to it, considering, you know, he chased off her boyfriend and then just wouldn’t leave.
Whatever the case, from then on her personality is basically subsumed by that of “biker wife.” Even as she owns her newfound status, she can’t help but become increasingly concerned with the obvious danger of Benny’s (only) hobby, not to mention finding herself in a tug of war with the Vandals’ leader, Johnny (Tom Hardy) over Benny’s affections — however much the inscrutable Benny is actually even capable of.
Few actors are as good at looking squinty and scarred as Tom Hardy, and Johnny surprisingly turns out to be one of his more intelligible roles. But as always, words are sort of beside the point with Hardy, so much he manages to convey with just eyebrow movements and mouth shapes. Johnny is also the character The Bikeriders most explores, getting the fullest character arc. He was a guy, we learn, who had a good union job with a wife and kids, who saw The Wild One on TV one night and decided on the spot to become an outlaw biker. We see Brando on screen deliver the famous line, “What are you even rebelling against?” “…Whatddya got?” which Hardy parrots under his breath — heh heh, yeah whaddya got — in way that’s impossible not to find yourself muttering for days afterwards. I’m reminded of Michael Gandolfini’s “hey cool, hamburger” line in The Many Saints of Newark.
From there, Johnny’s Vandals gang, with their poster-child Benny, do the usual biker gang stuff — get drunk, pal around, roll into town ominously, feud with other gangs, burn down bars, get rapey with women, and wonder what it all means at the inevitable funerals. Soon they face the problem that seems to bedevil all tight-knit male interest groups, outlaw or not: a younger generation of harder, meaner, more brutal protégés rising up to replace them, with no respect for what used to be the unspoken rules of the game. Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell always seem to give way to a Cheese and Marlo, in The Wire parlance.
It seems worth exploring why that is. The Bikeriders offers an observant portrait of these male group dynamics, and even a surface-level cultural analysis. Johnny started a biker gang because he thought it looked cool on TV, but then he attracted the orphaned children of society and soon a clique of disillusioned Vietnam vets came back from the war with a new nihilism to which the Johnnys and Bennys of the world couldn’t relate.
The “because Vietnam” of it, the rebelling because it feels free vs. rebelling because you’ve been abandoned by crumbling American institutions, feels a little pat. It doesn’t help that Nichols treats the post-Vietnam generation of bikers as a monolith, rather than a collection of individuals, without ever trying to explore their morals or motivations. The Bikeriders does have a Marlo, in the form of The Kid, played by Tobey Wallace, but he’s as loosely sketched as the name would suggest.
What drew these fashion rebels of the fifties and sixties like Johnny, and what kept them from going all the way to the dark side of rape and murder like some of the ones that came later? It’s the missing piece of The Bikeriders, and it seems like Nichols could’ve explored it through the character of Lyon. Why put him in the movie otherwise?