“The Bikeriders,” a romanticized ballad of tribal love, outlaw cool and the illusion of freedom, gets your motor runnin’ early. A drama flecked with absurdity and violence, it narrates the rise and inevitable dissolution of a Midwestern motorcycle club across the 1960s into the early ’70s, from the ebbing of the greaser era and past the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Not much happens, but the people are beautiful and so too are their bikes, rumbling beasts that tribe members ride and ride on that familiar closed loop known as Nowheresville, U.S.A.
The first essential thing to know about “The Bikeriders” is that the writer-director Jeff Nichols has, improbably, based the movie on a totemic photography book of the same title by the great American photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon. The second thing is that the movie stars Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy, a troika of charisma bombs who just have to show up for me to do the same. Nicely supported by a sprawling cast of other good lookers and hard workers, these three are among the draws in a movie that understands the seductions of beauty, the sensuous lines of a human body, the curves of a chassis.
The story, such as it is, traces the evolution of a fictional Chicago-area motorcycle club, the Vandals, from its racer origins. Scrambling the chronology, Nichols opens the story midway in 1965 with one member, Benny (Butler), being harassed at a bar by two strangers who want him to remove his “colors,” his ragged denim vest adorned with the club’s name. (Why? Why not?) Soon, punches are being thrown, and one stranger is swinging a shovel at the back of Benny’s head. Nichols freezes on Benny’s face with the shovel framed behind him like a cockeyed metal halo, a wryly funny image that captures a moment in time, much as Lyon did in his photos, and heralds the violence — its threats and giddy thrills — of the bikers’ lives.
For a few years in the early and mid-1960s when Lyon was in his 20s, he rode with a real Chicago club, the Outlaws, one of the oldest such groups in the country, charting his adventure in photographs and audio recordings. In 1968, the year before Dennis Hopper’s biker film “Easy Rider” opened, Lyon published “The Bikeriders,” a collection of black-and-white photos with accompanying interviews. One of his interviewees was the real Benny’s wife, Kathy Bauer, a philosopher of male behavior whom Nichols has made the narrator and is played by Comer with rough charm and a chewy, g-dropping accent. (You can compare her pitch-perfect interpretation of Bauer’s voice on Lyon’s website bleakbeauty.com.)
Using the book as his lodestar, Nichols borrows from Lyon by turns directly, elliptically and sometimes clumsily, while making some instructive omissions: Some of the bikers wear Iron Cross patches, but if there’s a Nazi swastika or Confederate flag here, emblems flaunted by some white bikers including Danny’s old Outlaw pals, I missed it. Nichols’s most cumbersome move is to have turned Lyon into a supporting character, a bland, earnest smiler (Mike Faist), who basically holds a mic while Kathy chronicles her biker life and times. More subtle and intriguing are Nichols’s efforts to capture the power of Lyon’s photos which — with their dynamic mixture of pictorial beauty and thematic grit, hyper-masculinity and homosocial intimacy — tell a specific 20th-century American story of being and belonging.
To that end, Nichols at times re-creates the original photographs, say, with a shot of Benny riding alone across a bridge while looking backward, an image that condenses the paradoxes of his life. Like the other club members, Benny tends to rack up miles without going anywhere very far, a provincialism that is one of the most American things about them. In another scene, Kathy recounts the first time she saw Benny, head bowed, leaning on a barroom pool table with his bared, muscly arms. Nichols catches this moment memorably, as does Comer, whose face opens in wonder as the camera pushes in toward Benny and he raises his head.
He’s preposterously good-looking (I laughed), and so too is this quintessentially cinematic moment, which conveys the mesmerizing allure that this biker brotherhood can have, including on outsiders (like Nichols, presumably). It’s clear as crystal why, within minutes, Kathy has saddled up on the back of Benny’s bike and is leaning into his body as the night closes around them, the darkness cocooning them from the world, their faces lit up with the fleeting, escapist joy of just going nowhere in particular. Both Benny’s introduction and Kathy’s reaction to him — they soon marry — also help lay the foundation for the tested, increasingly strained triangle that the couple forms with Johnny (Hardy), the club’s leader.
Nichols tries to gin up some dramatic tension via this triangle, including during an exchange on another night when Johnny, who’s an older family man, attempts to persuade Benny to take over the club. Nichols and his cinematographer Adam Stone frame the men face-to-face against the velvety blackness, using chiaroscuro lighting to underscore the intensity of an encounter that — as Johnny presses his case, inching closer and closer to Benny as he talks — shifts the men’s relationship from the vaguely Oedipal to the distinctly sexual. In this scene and throughout the movie, Hardy deploys his character’s heat, imposing physicality and somewhat whiny, high-pitched voice to convey Johnny’s power and soulful vulnerability.
Like Benny’s beauty and Kathy’s more wistful reminiscences, Johnny gives “The Bikeriders” a melancholic cast that stokes the story’s romance, which is very much a product of Nichols’s imagination rather than a quality that’s in Lyon’s photos. Nichols clearly loves the book, and I imagine sweetening it for his movie helped its commercial prospects. (There’s some family history here, as well: Nichols’s brother Ben Nichols, the frontman in the band Lucero, wrote a song inspired by the book.) For the most part, the main performers have the highly polished sheen of most contemporary American actors, Michael Shannon’s Vandal, Zipco, and some artfully gnarly teeth notwithstanding; like the movie itself, they’re designed to please and do.
“The Bikeriders” would work nicely on a double bill with the 1953 film “The Wild Ones,” about biker gangs that briefly overrun a small town. Nichols slips in a few nods (and smiles) at that movie, which helped solidify Marlon Brando’s stardom. The film was apparently a favorite of the real Johnny, who kept images of Brando in biker leathers in a scrapbook. As unintentionally silly as it is reliably entertaining, “The Wild Ones” is as square (and camp) as Hollywood gets. “This is a shocking story,” the film promises, before seducing you with beery brawls and Brando’s poses and pouts, all of which — like “The Bikeriders” — don’t say anything terribly profound, even as they make the undeniable case for the pleasure of movies.
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