In the 1950s-1960s, the motorcycle picture was its own genre. During the postwar years, as military-trained mechanics demobbed into civilian life, motorcycle clubs sprang up all over the country. Some of these guys, combat vets who had developed a taste for Army Air Corps-issued amphetamine pills, were pretty rough customers. Their leather outfits and roaring chrome steeds made the bikers irresistible to the camera. In 1953, The Wild One, a story about the conflicted leader of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, made a superstar out of Marlon Brando. In the 1960s, Russ Meyer and Roger Corman made biker movies a cornerstone of their no-budget empires, launching the careers of folks like Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Jack Nicholson, and John Cassavetes. The genre hit its apex when Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider became a generation-defining hit in 1969.
Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders aims to resurrect the biker movie and take it to the art house. It’s based on a book of photography by Danny Lyon, who rode with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club from 1963 to 1968. He appears in The Bikeriders, played by Challengers’ Mike Faist, with camera and bulky tape recorder always in tow. Danny’s interviews with biker wife Kathy (Jodie Comer) provide the framework for Nichols’ unconventional story.
Kathy’s husband is Benny (Austin Butler), who is the right-hand man to Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), the founder of the Vandals, the fictionalized version of the Chicago-based Outlaws. Nichols tells his story in layered flashbacks, adding details as Kathy remembers them. The Vandals were a regular old club of guys racing dirt bikes until Johnny saw The Wild One and decided that was boring. What are we going to do, asks his friend Brucie (Damon Herriman), sit around and talk about motorcycles?
“That’s what we do anyways,” says Johnny.
There’s a little more to it than that. They also drink truckloads of booze and fight, both other biker gangs and each other. Despite the fact that he has a day job as a truck driver and a suburban house with a wife and kids, Johnny maintains control of the organization through violence. If you challenge his leadership, you have to fight him. He wasn’t the biggest one, but he was the meanest one, says Kathy. Big Jack (Happy Anderson) finds this out the hard way.
Johnny surrounds himself with weirdos who share his motorbike obsession. There’s the aforementioned Brucie, whose red hair makes him look like someone squished Conan O’Brien. Cockroach (Emory Cohen) is called so because of his diet. Make of that what you will. Michael Shannon is Zipco, a Lithuanian immigrant who rails against “the pinkos.” When he tried to volunteer to go to Vietnam, he was rejected as an “undesirable,” and he’s still sore about it.
Then there’s Benny. He’s a man of uncomplicated pleasures. His mere smoldering presence is enough to break up relationships. And most importantly, he can take a lot of punishment in a fight. The film opens with Benny getting his ass decisively kicked for refusing to take off his colors. By the late ’60s, the Vandals’ reputation was such that the guys stopped wearing their leather jackets and denim vests unless they were in a group, fearing they would get jumped if caught by a rival gang alone. Everyone, that is, except Benny. His devotion to the club borders on the fanatical, a fact that is not lost on Johnny, who is looking for a successor. But as the ’60s progress, embittered veterans of the Vietnam War join the rapidly expanding club. They have a taste for more and harder drugs, and the motorcycle club gives them a ready-made smuggling and distribution infrastructure. Johnny’s generation were middle-class poseurs pretending to be Marlon Brando. The new breed took the bravado far too seriously.
Nichols and his cinematographer Adam Stone shoot the bikers like mythical figures, which, in a way, they are. But the actual characters are anything but mythical. This film is exceptional for what his bikers don’t do. They don’t plan a heist or go on a killing spree. One minute, they’re brawling with a rival gang; the next, the enemies are having beers and telling stories around the campfire. Their most dangerous habit is riding without a helmet. But a helmet would interfere with Austin Butler’s superb haircut, and we certainly can’t have that. For a film starring a bunch of sexy guys in leather, The Bikeriders is surprisingly chaste. Benny and Kathy never do much more than cuddle. For all its pretensions to realism, like Kathy’s extravagant Chicago accent, the film feels sanitized. Thanks to a clutch of charismatic performances, it’s still hypnotically fun to watch. It might even inspire you to jump on a motorcycle. Just don’t ride without a helmet.
The Bikeriders
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