The Allure of ‘The Bikeriders’ Can’t Outrace All the Clichés

Watching television with his wife and young daughters one night in the mid-1960s, Johnny (Tom Hardy), a roughneck, spiritually stifled truck driver, stumbles across a prime-time broadcast of 1953’s The Wild One—a seminal depiction of biker gang rituals that also doubled as a showcase for the white-hot charisma of the young Marlon Brando. (“Mr. Brando is vicious and relentless,” opined The New York Times, admiringly.) The girls aren’t interested, but Dad’s riveted. “Whataya got?” he murmurs to himself, echoing the defiant mantra of Brando’s antiheroic Johnny Strabler, whose rhetoric of rebellion for the hell of it resonates with this suburban family man on some deep, prefrontal level. (It helps, perhaps, that they share a first name.)

A few years later, Johnny’s come across enough kindred spirits on the outskirts of Chicago to form his own version of The Wild One’s iconic Black Rebels Motorcycle Club; his outfit is a scrappy contingent called the Vandals, whose colors are modeled on the Hell’s Angels and whose antics are typically antisocial without being sociopathic. “They’re OK,” Johnny tells one dubious visitor to the late-night bar his acolytes have colonized in the Vandals’ grease-stained image. “They’re just trying to have some laughs.” The question, of course, is at whose expense. The answer, which doubles as a kind of existential punchline, is that their brand of playful roughhousing is all fun and games until someone loses an eye or gets shot—after that, to quote another well-known biker-gang enthusiast, that joke isn’t funny anymore.

The idea of a bunch of wannabe weekend road warriors taking their cues from the movies—and faking their alpha-male aspirations until they become real—is a rich and fascinating subject for a film, and for a while, Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders bristles with genuine promise. Around the turn of the millennium, it looked like Nichols was on his way to becoming a major contemporary cinematic chronicler of American masculinity, beginning with 2007’s excellent Shotgun Stories—a lyrically shot and edited Faulknerian fable documenting a long-running, hopelessly futile family feud. At once mythic and everyday, it was a film that felt steeped in Southern tradition without stooping to blue-state sanctimony. Even better was Take Shelter (2011), which gave Shotgun’s leading man, Michael Shannon, a tour de force showcase as a stressed-out father who becomes convinced it’s the end of the world as he knows it. Standing on the side of the highway, gazing up with fear and awe at a lightning strike of biblical proportions, Shannon embodied a heartbreaking mix of rage and anxiety; his pent-up Chicken Little act resonated beyond the film’s Twilight Zone setup. “You think I’m crazy?” he pleads with his friends and neighbors at a town meeting. “Well, listen up, there’s a storm coming like nothing you’ve ever seen, and not a one of you is prepared for it.” Without straining for allegory, Nichols’s script connected to something deep and frightening in the zeitgeist—the percolating anxieties of a country staring down imminent and unprecedented political and environmental chaos.

Since then, Nichols’s record is hit-and-miss: He hasn’t made a feature since 2016’s doubleheader of Midnight Special (a spotty if sincere exercise in Spielberg worship featuring loving nods to E.T. and Close Encounters) and Loving, which threw its hat in the prestige historical drama ring. That film’s best sequences featured an uncharacteristically laid-back Shannon as a Life magazine photographer sent to create a photo essay about the controversial interracial marriage of the characters played by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga; Shannon’s role is a fascinating study of the intersection between authentic curiosity and professional ingratiation. There’s a similar character in The Bikeriders: Danny Lyon (Mike Faist), a slick, intelligent photojournalist whose ongoing project is a study of the Vandals, including in-depth testimonies by past and present members and intimate, candid snapshots of their various activities. His most loquacious interviewee is Kathy (Jodie Comer), the long-suffering—yet perpetually smitten—wife of Johnny’s chief lieutenant and bromantic best buddy, Benny (Austin Butler); the film is structured mostly by Kathy’s memories of meeting Benny and trying to keep the big, sensitive lug from fulfilling the self-destructive fantasies being peddled by his brothers-in-arms.

The real-life Danny Lyon was a significant figure of the New Journalism of the late 1960s; having already made a name for himself documenting the Civil Rights struggle in the deep South, he embedded himself with a Chicago gang known as the Outlaws, capturing extremes of brutality and tenderness that translated smoothly into glossy black-and-white spreads. A bestseller that hit shelves in the wake of Roger Corman’s exploitation-movie classic The Wild Angels—and just ahead of Dennis Hopper’s culture-shaking Easy Rider—The Bikeriders helped to solidify the romantic conception of motorcycle gangs as bruised, iconoclastic outsiders. (It also predated the anarchy of Altamont, which served as a flip side to all those delusions of grandeur.) If Lyon’s gleaming, black-and-white images are guilty of beautifying his hard-living subjects, it’s an aesthetic in line with their own vaunted self-image; the characters in his book believe sincerely in the relationship between transgression and transcendence. “In my America, people were all different, they were handsome, and everything around them was beautiful,” Lyon told an interviewer. “And most of all, they were free.”

That Nichols has taken his own freedoms with Lyon’s material is fair enough: Nobody should expect a movie like The Bikeriders to be a documentary. And in visual terms, the film has some of the same graphic power as its source; Adam Stone’s cinematography is burnished without being embalmed, and a couple of passages—like Kathy’s first ride with Benny, which begins with the two of them hurtling over a bridge alone before the rest of the Vandals surge into view behind them as an array of flickering headlights—are seductive and memorable. Nichols remains a solid, intelligent filmmaker who takes his projects seriously. The problem is that, as in Midnight Special, he allows his individuality to be subsumed into homage—specifically to Martin Scorsese, whose trademark panoply of slow zooms, brooding close-ups, and blood-drawing needle drops is evoked here to the point of rip-off. One early freeze-frame of a character in the midst of an act of violence is so indebted to Goodfellas that you expect Jimmy Conway to show up and demand a vig.

It might seem unfair to ding Nichols for imitation as flattery when plenty of other—and lesser—filmmakers are guilty of the same thing. But there’s also something to be said about holding talented dramatists to a higher standard, and following the richly detailed protagonists of Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, it’s disappointing how many characters in The Bikeriders feel like clichés or ciphers. The latter is especially true of Benny, who’s meant to be a tortured soul but who comes across as something considerably less compelling, as if his creator has drawn a blank and called it portraiture. The idea for him—and it’s an interesting one—is an uneasy rider: a thoroughbred who unconsciously longs to be fenced in, lest he come to a bad end. Butler even triumphs in an early comic bit when Benny evades the cops during a high-speed pursuit but runs out of gas—a goofy but suggestive metaphor about his deceptive potency. But even though Butler’s a good, careful actor attuned to physical and behavioral specificity (like Brando, he understands that a lot of his character’s posturing is on his own behalf), he never quite fills out the psychological profile of a man whose only bit of backstory is that he refuses to cry (a tidbit that leads us to patiently count down to the moment when he will wince plaintively at his lover, and us, with tears in his eyes).

The Ringer’s Streaming Guide

There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.

Whether or not it’s truly his fault, Butler never seems to be doing enough in The Bikeriders, whereas Comer—and, inevitably, Hardy—are doing a lot. Not only in terms of their accents, which belong in the British-actors-being-American Hall of Fame, but in the skittering, over-deliberate rhythms of their line readings—especially opposite each other. Hardy may be the most frustrating great actor of his generation, not least of all because of his choice in roles: He’s a brilliant, mercurial talent and obviously self-aware enough to know the difference between playful showboating (like as Bane or Venom) and serious stunt acting (try 2013’s one-man show Locke, which remains his best showcase). But such distinctions don’t really matter when the part is as florid up top—and thin underneath—as Johnny, whose descent into authoritarian megalomania is not only dully predictable, but also dramatically dishonest. After setting the character up as a symbol of cosplay gone lethally awry—and having Hardy glower his way through pantomimes of threat and intimidation—Nichols tries to pull a fast one and make his quasi-Brando-ish antihero into a tragic martyr, a saintly victim of his own social experiment (and the times that are a-changin’) as opposed to a flawed perpetrator. As for Comer—who, to her credit, is nearly unrecognizable in chain-smoking Midwestern attire—she either to be auditioning for either the Coen brothers or a Meryl Streep appreciation society; it’s a flittery, nasal tour de force of folksy neurosis, and the only thing you can do with a performance like it is have it nominated for an Oscar. Kathy’s great fear is that no matter how accepting—and permissive—she is with Benny about the company he keeps, she’ll end up smothering him anyway; as much as The Bikeriders means to take Kathy’s side, especially once the Vandals start taking on new and ruthless members who aren’t actually harmless once you get to know them, there’s still a sense in which Comer’s big scenes feel (intentionally or not) like killjoys.

There is one scene in which The Bikeriders completely fulfills its promise as a trenchant and sympathetic ballad of beautiful losers, and, not surprisingly, it’s the one where Shannon—who’s on hand as a minor member of Johnny’s gang named Zipco—comes to the fore. Seated in front of a cozy campfire after a typically testosterone-fueled club party (one punctuated by the ominous arrival of Californian bikers looking to join up), the Vandals listen collectively to their buddy’s story of trying to sign up for service in Vietnam—a tragicomedy of errors that flips the politics of the era on its head. For Zipco—a Latvian-born fuckup with no cozy home life to retreat to—fighting overseas isn’t something to protest or dodge; his anger at being rejected on the basis of his biker-gang appearance and lifestyle (including being wickedly hungover at the meeting) recontextualizes the question of what it means to be “undesirable.” Here, Shannon taps into the same modest but incandescent anguish that marked his performances in Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, while Nichols downshifts from trying to tell a big, sweeping story to letting an individual narrative unfold on its own, ornery terms. The result is a wonderful, self-contained little masterpiece exploring the paradoxes of patriotism and nonconformity—the profane, earnest lament of an unkempt, dead-end shit-kicker who’s furious that he missed the chance to defend a country whose ideology he’s largely opted out of. The scene is funny, haunting, and complex: a reminder of what Nichols is capable of at his best. It sticks in the mind long after the rest of his handsome, meticulous, and disposable film has faded away.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.