Ride or Die
Jeff Nichols tries to figure out why we’re all so deathly afraid of bikers in his mediation on a uniquely American subculture.
The Bikeriders
Director: Jeff Nichols • Writer: Jeff Nichols, based on the book by Danny Lyon
Starring: Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Mike Faist, Boyd Holbrook, Toby Wallace, Damon Herriman, Norman Reedus
USA • 1hr 56mins
Opens Hong Kong Sep 19 • IIB
Grade: B
If you’re looking for a Sons of Anarchy origin story, move along. Nothing to see in The Bikeriders.
What The Bikeriders is, is an examination of how and why subcultures form, expand, reach an unsustainable critical mass, and collapse. Collapse or morph into something less pure and more malevolent. It’s also an exercise in star-making, because director Jeff Nichols (who participated in the McConaughnaissance with Mud, the Oscar and BAFTA nominated interracial marriage drama Loving) was clearly given copious notes on how he his regular DOP Adam Stone could best shoot co-star Austin Butler (Elvis, Dune: Part Two) – the main note being “lovingly and coolly”. Butler’s outlaw biker character Benny Cross glides into and out of perfect lighting, fires up a cigarette with more grace than James Dean ever could, and turns his perfectly coiffed head at just the right angle to highlight long lashes and rosy lips. It’s insane. If the bikeriders’ turn from club to gang weren’t so grim The Bikeriders would be the perfect vintage fashion ad. But, based as it is on photographer Danny Lyon’s visual history, it’s fascinatingly grim – and how it got that way provides the thematic backbone to the long-delayed (mostly due to the SAG-AFTRA strike) movie and loaded with retro needle drops. Plus: It has Tom Hardy mumbling in his Tom Hardy way. That’s always a good thing.
The romance we want
The Bikeriders begins with Kathy (Jodie Comer, sounding like an SCTV sketch) telling photographer Danny Lyon (Mike Faist, Challengers) the story of how she met her husband Benny back in 1965, when he was but a young thing enjoying the freedom and camaraderie of the nascent Chicago-based motorcycle club The Vandals (a fictionalised version of the real world Outlaws Motorcycle Club). It’s that odd time in the States when war in Vietnam was raging but the bodies hadn’t quite started piling up in the public consciousness, and the anti-war, anti-state, pro-sex, pro-drugs hippie movement was just starting to gain traction. The Shangri-Las and Cream sit side-by-side on the radio. Benny and his pals Johnny (Hardy), Cal (Boyd Holbrook) and Brucie (tremendous Australian character actor Damon Herriman, Justified, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood), among others, just ride around, smoke, drink beer, get into the occasional dust-up (don’t ask them to take off their colours), and mostly bond – very manfully – with each other. Back then they were bikeriders – not bikers. The tats, navel rings, drug trafficking and concert security stabbings were a decade down the road.
As Kathy tells it, Johnny’s inspired to start the club after watching Marlon Brando in The Wild One, giving he, Benny and the boys a place to chill away from the duties of family. Time goes on and eventually the club starts straining under the weight of its own success and with the arrival of rougher, more fucked up members, many returnees from Vietnam. By 1975 the club is all but finished, still around but heading in a post-’60s increasingly violent direction under the leadership of one of Johnny’s rivals, The Kid (Toby Wallace, Ron Howard’s forthcoming Eden).
If you can get past the metric ton of unplaceable accents and undefinable cadences Comer, Butler and Hardy spew forth and your ears don’t erupt there’s a solid if conventional drama buried in The Bikeriders about bike culture, one that Nichols could easily have glamourised, but doesn’t. Biker gang mythology is almost as thick as that of the western – home of the OG outlaw – defined as it is by rigid independence and rugged alternative living. Johnny’s beloved The Wild One might have been the first, but it was followed by The Wild Angels, The Loveless (Kathryn Bigelow’s first film) and the granddaddy of them all, Easy Rider among scads of others. But Nichols doesn’t demonise the scene either, despite The Vandals’ rising criminality and dwindling morality. There’s even more fun to be had if you read the Kathy-Benny-Johnny triangle as a battle between Kathy and Johnny for Benny’s heart and soul.
Optional homoeroticism aside, that tug of war gives the film its emotional through line, and in many ways makes the genuine bonds the characters share – particularly with the paternal Brucie and the club’s good-hearted conscience, Cockroach (Emory Cohen, currently on Netflix’s Rebel Ridge, which is worth your time) – that much more meaningful, and gives them that much more impact when shit goes sideways. Though Butler spends a great deal of time posing, he’s admittedly quietly affecting in his disillusionment, currently the actor’s bread and butter. Comer is a tiny bit underwritten, Hardy is Hardy, so it’s up to the supporting players – Holbrook, Herriman, Cohen, Michael Shannon, Happy Anderson, Beau Knapp – to carry the drama, and they do. They make the solidarity of The Vandals palpable, even as the club-gang fractures, and make their sorrow at the loss of that solidarity vivid. Even if no one’s hair can top Butler’s. — DEK