The Bikeriders (2024)
dir. Jeff Nichols
Rated: R
image: ©2024 Focus Features
There’s a great story that Patton Oswalt tells in one of his standup routines about a tattoo artist who, while working on a customer, needed to make an adjustment to his needle. To get it working correctly, Oswalt says, the tattoo artist scraped his needle across his own leg without a second thought. He needed an unmarked bit of flesh to test his instrument, and his own body provided it. Oswalt marvels at how little regard this artist had for his own body. He pontificates about how he could never have a tattoo like that, because to get one would take intention. The beauty of the random marks on that tattoo artist is that he put them there without giving a damn about it.
A character in writer/director Jeff Nichols’s newest film, The Bikeriders, expresses a similar awe for this kind of outlook. He is held in thrall by one of his fellow biker gang members because he admires the man’s ability and follow through to “not care about nothin’.” The Bikeriders is, on the whole, also enchanted by its subjects’ nihilism. Nichols’s deep curiosity about human behavior and his non-judgmental, empathetic artistic style makes his film about small-scale fascism an engrossing portrait of our endless capacity for love and hate.
Looking at Nichols’s career to date, you can see these preoccupations surface again and again. His debut, Shotgun Stories, explores the complicated emotions of a set of siblings in the wake of the death of their abusive father; Take Shelter is the tale of a man’s life falling apart in his effort to protect his family; Mud examines how much we are willing to give of ourselves to complete strangers; Midnight Special is about a father doing anything to protect his son; Loving is about the power of human love, even (and especially) when it’s illegal. (I’m happy to say I’m nearly a Jeff Nichols completist; I only need to catch up with Loving.)
Nichols has wanted to make The Bikeriders since 2003, after reading the nonfiction photography book on which it’s based. Actor Michael Shannon – who has appeared in each of Nichols’s films – heard about the project each and every time the pair worked together. The movie takes place between 1965 and 1975, and tells the story of the Chicago-based Vandals Motorcycle Club. The Vandals are a fictionalization of the real-life Outlaws Motorcycle Club, which was the subject of photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon’s book.
Told from the perspective of Kathy, the wife of a Vandals member, The Bikeriders mainly focuses on Benny (Kathy’s husband) and Johnny, the founder of the Vandals. The two men experience the ups and downs of the club, which ultimately leads to one of them being murdered. The character of Danny Lyon plays a limited role in the film, dropping in occasionally to check up on the group via interviews with Kathy. (This is a departure from the book; the real Danny Lyon, who practiced New Journalism, actually joined the Outlaws while documenting them.)
The Bikeriders is subtly steeped in cinema. Johnny was inspired to form the Vandals after watching The Wild One. The most iconic moment of that movie – when a character asks Marlon Brando’s Johnny what he’s rebelling against, and Brando answers, “Whaddya got?” – plays as The Bikeriders’ Johnny gets a glint in his eye about starting his own motorcycle club. In the final minutes of the movie, we’re told one Vandals member was hired to park his bike in front of a movie theater to drum up business for what is perhaps the most famous biker movie of all time, Easy Rider.
The homages don’t stop with movies referenced directly within the story. Since motorcycle clubs, like the mob, are essentially little fascist dictatorships, Nichols evokes the iconic mob movie Goodfellas throughout his picture. We meet Kathy in a truncated riff on Karen Hill’s introduction in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece. When, in dreamy slow motion, we see Kathy on the back of Benny’s bike, with her eyes closed and a delicate smile on her face, it’s hard not to hear Karen from Goodfellas: “I know there are women…who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.”
Nichols also fills his movie with wonderful needle drops, a few of which (like Muddy Waters’s Mannish Boy) can be heard on the Goodfellas soundtrack. The Mannish Boy moment is immediately followed by a splendid use of Cream’s I Feel Free, set against the gang tearing by a tranquil midwestern corn field on their bikes. Cinematographer Adam Stone shoots Nichols’s ode to off-kilter Americana in sumptuous and warm tones, making the biker lifestyle (from the safe distance of a couch in front of a TV screen, at least) appear beautiful and wondrous.
The beauty of the cinematography quickly and often gives way in The Bikeriders to the ugly brutality of what’s happening within the story. Biker gangs operate under fascistic power dynamics wherein might makes right and a challenge to power inevitably involves violence. This is a story, as we’re told, about guys who, “don’t belong nowhere else,” so must find community and meaning (however much violence comes with it) in each other.
Nichols comes to within a hair’s breadth of endorsing the Vandals’ fascistic tendencies; he shoots sequences like Benny nearly losing a foot during a scrape against some disgruntled locals with a certain machismo glee. At one point, Johnny orders the bar whose owner allowed the attack on Benny burned to the ground. Johnny looks on in both wonder and terror as he realizes that the cops and fire department are letting it burn because they are scared of the Vandals.
There is a sense of unease right below the surface in the above-mentioned scene, but it’s also an undeniable victory for our troubled protagonists. What stops Nichols short is the way he unromantically showcases where this life eventually leads. The callous murder that signals the beginning of the end for the Vandals is one. The near-gang-rape of Kathy by newer, more violent members of the Vandals is another.
The ensemble cast of The Bikeriders does a lot to secure our emotional buy-in to the characters and story, with mixed results on their dedication to reproducing the midwestern accent. English actor Jodie Comer, as Kathy, turns up her take on the accent to eleven. I suspect that screenings of the movie Fargo factored heavily in her preparation.
In that movie, the wildly exaggerated accents are used to comedic effect; Comer here simply seems to be trying too hard. The rest of her performance is both splendidly understated and delicate. She allows us to experience both Kathy’s exuberance and fearful exasperation at being bound to Benny and, as a consequence, the Vandals.
Fellow Englishman Tom Hardy might have let his Chicago accent get away from him to play Johnny, but he adds a nasally quality to his voice and delivers almost all of his lines in an intense sotto voce, adding critical nuance to the performance. Hardy also excels at portraying a man who can only find contentment on top of a motorcycle or by subjugating his fellow Vandals.
Having successfully shaken off his infamous Elvis Presley accent for Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic, Austin Butler delivers a quietly soulful performance as Benny. The Bikeriders is an ensemble piece, which means no one actor rises above the rest for too long during the movie, and Butler adds an extra sense of aloofness through grunts and intense gazes.
As mentioned above, Michael Shannon continues his streak of appearing in each of Jeff Nichols’s films. Here he plays Zipco, a not-too-bright Vandals member who despises “pinkos” and who believes that working with your hands is the only noble work there is. Shannon gives a wonderfully nuanced performance in the brief amount of screen time he has as Zipco. As is usually the case, I would have enjoyed at least 20% more Shannon here.
The Bikeriders is framed as Kathy’s story of falling in love with Benny and the biker lifestyle before becoming irreparably disillusioned with both. But the real love story at the center of the movie is the one between Benny and Johnny and all the Vandals men and their bikes. Nichols’s film shows us that men would rather form a motorcycle club that devolves into a gang of violence and destruction as a way to bond than go to therapy. In Nichols’s hands, the result is a heartfelt recreation of a subculture and an empathetic and complicated examination of a subset of society’s outcasts.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Jeff Nichols turns in another closely observed study of human interaction and emotion. The Bikeriders captures a subculture at a specific moment in time, and the result is fairly captivating.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek with my closing paragraph. The men-would-rather-do-X-than-go-to-therapy bit has become somewhat of a cliché. I promise to make this the last time I employ it, at least for a while. But aside from that, Nichols shows us a bigger problem than men refusing to go to therapy. During the movie, we meet a 20-year-old kid who wants to join the Vandals. One scene shows us his home life, where his father regularly beats his mother, and, we assume, his son. Seeing that his home life is defined by this kind of brutality — and knowing that it probably applies in one way or another to every biker we see on screen — makes us understand that this kid didn’t have a chance. He was destined to adopt brutality, which we see metastasize into deadly violence, because that’s all he had modeled for him at home. We must fix this problem first and worry about who’s going to therapy afterwards.
- It was great to see Paul Sparks, whose work I enjoyed in the Netflix series House of Cards, as well as the movie Thoroughbreds (he’s also good as Billy Graham in an episode of The Crown), on screen again. This is his third collaboration with Nichols.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Because of a certain recent change in the dynamics of the 2024 US Presidential race, I think I’m starting to come out of the existential funk in which I’ve been stuck. I’m anxious to catch up on some 2024 titles that I initially missed. The Bikeriders is one of those titles. I missed its (woefully short) theatrical run, and caught up with it on the Peacock streaming service. It’s currently available to stream with a Peacock subscription or to buy on select platforms.