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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE BIKERIDERS IS RUNNING ON FUMES  
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Eileen Jones
July 1, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders coasts on Austin Butler’s outlaw
charm and an excellent performance from Tom Hardy. But neither can get
this nostalgia piece into third gear. _

Austin Butler smokes a cigarette as Benny in The Bikeriders. , (Focus
Features / Youtube)

 

_The Bikeriders_ is about a 1960s motorcycle club that transforms
over the course of roughly ten years into a criminal gang. Directed by
Jeff Nichols (_Loving_,_ Mud_,_ Midnight Special_), it’s based on
a 1968 book of photography by Danny Lyon. Lyon had been the
photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
participating in the civil rights movement, and in a lifetime of
immersing himself in movements as a photojournalist, he also covered
the 2011 Occupy movement “from the inside.” But in 1963 he began
documenting the lives of Chicago’s Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Lyon’s
love for his fellow club/gang members is illustrated in a series of
affectionate photos from his book that appear at the end as the
credits roll.

 

The film seems to be going for the same affectionate view of the
fictionalized Chicago Vandals MC, but it loses a lot of the bracing,
rough-edged, often humorous quality of the photos in favor of a
romantic worship of key members of the club/gang, which veers toward
the ludicrous. Stars Tom Hardy and Austin Butler (the heartthrob from
Baz Luhrmann’s _Elvis)_ are particularly revered as Johnny and
Benny, the most charismatic club/gang leaders whose bond drifts from
vaguely father-son to sexually charged codependence.

The third corner of the central love triangle is occupied by Jodie
Comer, as Kathy, the luckless woman who falls in love at first sight
with absurdly handsome Benny and marries him in spite of his emotional
remoteness and single-minded obsession with motorcycles. She’s the
disenchanted observer who narrates in an effortful “dese, dem, and
dose guys” accent a series of flashbacks about a tough but
provincial bunch of working-class locals who just want to ride around
experiencing the illusion of freedom but, as their biker popularity
and influence expands, descend into increasingly nasty violence.

Mike Faist plays the Danny Lyon part, a sadly passive role that gives
him nothing to do but take photos and ask questions and arch his
eyebrows quizzically at the answers.

Having Kathy narrate the film is a canny move, in that it suggests a
critical take on these guys and their “club” that isn’t really
borne out by the insistently romanticizing narrative. Danny
Lyon admitted
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romanticized the bikers too, but his disillusionment was in far
harsher terms than the film ever provides:

I was kind of horrified by the end. I remember I had a big
disagreement with this guy who rolled out a huge Nazi flag as a picnic
rug to put our beers on. By then I had realized that some of these
guys were not so romantic after all. Then, when there was a race riot
in Chicago, these big macho guys were scared to leave the club house
in case they would be attacked by black people. I just thought it was
laughable.

That’s what’s missing in this oddly inert film. It just goes on
worshipping these guys throughout, with Adam Stone’s cinematography
permanently set on admiring soft focus, especially whenever it’s
aimed at Butler’s character. Butler is at a stage in his career
that’s reminiscent of the young Brad Pitt in his early heartthrob
years, starring in inane fare like _Legends of the Fall_ (1994)
and _Meet Joe Black_ (1998). Pitt used to lower his head and peek up
through the artfully coiffed blonde hair falling over his brow in
exactly the same way Butler does now. Pitt grew out of that stage and
over the years has attained a certain humorous grace about his
ridiculous good looks. Let’s hope Butler can manage to do the same.

 

No matter how insistently Kathy claims these Vandals are almost all
“bums” with no jobs who hang around in bars much of the time,
attended by women in beehive hairdos, besotted by them no matter how
badly they’re treated, we watch her doing the same thing, apparently
helpless to extricate herself. The night she meets Benny, she’s full
of disapproval of the leather-clad guys eyeing her menacingly at the
bar. She’s followed outside by about ten of them, who all circle her
with what sure looks like bad intentions, before Benny rescues her and
whisks her away on his motorcycle.

Johnny later assures her that nothing would’ve happened: “They all
just want to go out with you.”

But it sure looked like a gang rape waiting to happen. And so when
years later she’s attacked by a mob of men at a party — by the
supposedly more violent and depraved younger men joining the club and
turning it into a gang — it doesn’t look like a dramatic change in
the nature of the Vandals’ partying. It looks like business as usual
with a slightly darker spin on it.

There are hints at the hollow stupidity of a lot of this macho
strutting, and indications of the feeble conservative ideology
underlying all the biker guff about outlaw “freedom.” Michael
Shannon, who’s very good as Zipco, sporting shaggy hair, rotten
teeth, and lugubrious self-pity, tells a long story about his
desperate desire to join the service so he could fight in the Vietnam
War, describing how he cried when he was rejected for being an
undesirable type. And Cockroach (Emory Cohen) sees no contradiction in
shifting gears from membership in the Chicago Vandals to a career as a
motorcycle cop.

Nevertheless, I watched _The Bikeriders_ with one unchanging
thought: I am so sick of this shit.

It probably didn’t help that the previews at the screening were
advertising nostalgic films solemnly celebrating honor culture among
old-timey white guys, with Kevin Costner’s _Horizon: An American
Saga_ as exhibit A. You know the kind of shit I mean. There has to
be, for example, a fight scene in which an apparently overmatched hero
stands off lesser mortals with nothing but his awesome courage and
fortitudinous badassery to see him through. So there’s paunchy old
Costner fighting younger men who dare to suggest they might take his
gun away from him. And in _Bikeriders,_ there’s middle-aged
Johnny, always ready when challenged by younger gang members to ask
with absolute fearless indifference, “Fists or knives?”

 

Admittedly, Tom Hardy sells this a lot better than that ham Costner.
Good actor, Hardy. His soft, high-pitched voice as Johnny, contrasting
his bullheaded, blocky body, nicely represents the character’s
contradictions, and his increasing ruthlessness only has the effect of
making him quieter and more laconic. The pauses between the few words
he utters get so long that by the end of the film, you could drive
trucks through them.

Butler’s Benny is the far more annoying antihero. He withstands
physical punishment that would kill ordinary humans because he’s
just _that_ cool. The film starts with a saloon standoff that’s
evokes old Westerns, with two toughs confronting Benny about wearing
gang “colors” in the bar. They demand that he remove his jacket.
“You’ll have to kill me to get this jacket off,” he says.

So they try. A shovel swung full force to the back of the head, held
in freeze frame, will fail to do the job.

It’s Hardy who really brings the homoerotic desire to a late-night
showdown between Johnny and Benny, when Johnny tries a combination of
strong-arm coercion and pleading to get Benny to help him run the
out-of-control Vandals. Their two shadowy forms blend in darkness,
close enough to kiss, and for a minute, it seems like the film is
really going to go someplace interesting. Maybe it’ll turn out
there’s a compelling reason why Benny has been so disaffected all
this time, and why his love story with Kathy is so pallid and
unmoving?

But don’t get your hopes up. _The Bikeriders_ is a film that
really doesn’t go anyplace.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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