Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Bikeriders’ on VOD, a Biker-Gang Drama in Which Austin Butler and Tom Hardy Go Nowhere

Acclaimed filmmaker Mike Nichols returns after eight years of silence with The Bikeriders (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), a star-studded not-true-but-still-technically-BOATS (Based On A True Story) historical-fiction-ish movie inspired by the real-life Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy headline this mini-saga inspired by journalist Danny Lyon’s 1968 photo book The Bikeriders, which captured the lives of the Chicago-based biker gang that was a rival of the Hells Angels, and is now labeled an organized crime group by the U.S. Dept. of Justice. After making two extraordinary pseudo-supernatural films in Take Shelter and Mud, followed by full-blown but smallish scale sci-fi with the relatively disappointing Midnight Special, Nichols’ continues on the based-on-reality track of his last film, 2016’s underrated, exceptional drama Loving. So yes, I’m a fan. And to be honest, I don’t know if The Bikeriders is quite up to the lofty precedent of his best work.

THE BIKERIDERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “You’d have to kill me to get this jacket off.” Those are the words of Benny (Butler), who’s kind of a strong, silent, empty type. He’s alone, parked at a bar where the Vandals biker gang patches on his jacket render him a target. Two guys who are probably gangsters proceed to kick his ass and then we jump back in time a stretch, to the day when Kathy (Comer) fell head over heels for Benny’s smoldering coif and wispy facial hair and almost-zero words coming out of his mouth. She narrates, and she talks like she’s working way too hard to satirize a Midwestern accent. She’s a naive gal and she walks into a Chi-caww-go bar full of grimy bikers and she’s like oh jeez until she sees Benny and can’t peel her eyes off of him. She meets a girl friend of hers who speaks just as ridiculously: “Let me get yah a pahp,” she says, and you might have to turn on the subtitles to understand that the lady’s fetching Kathy a soft drink of some kind. She talks to Benny and even though he’s like a cardboard standee of Austin Butler playing James Dean in a fashion-rag photo shoot, “Five weeks later, I married him,” Kathy says.

Kathy’s narration is her sharing her story with Danny Lyon (Mike Faist of Challengers fame), a college kid who’s documenting the Vandals’ story. The gang consists of working-class Caucasian wrench-head family men who seem to need some camaraderie and an outlet for their roughneck urges. Legend has it Johnny (Hardy) watched Marlon Brando in The Wild One and was inspired to buy a motorcycle and gather up some friends with nicknames like Wahoo and Corky and Shitty Pete and Big Jack and Fat Jack and Ugly Jack (not to be confused with Ugly Jackie) and Slightly Less Big Jack (OK, I’m making some of these up) brrap-brrappp around the city on their hogs and choppers, and hang out in a scuzzy bar on the corner and go out to the country and tear up some mud and drink and get into fistfights and generally raise hell. Do they keep their day jobs? I think so? Are they making a living doing anything like robbing folks or running drugs? Dunno, maybe? But they do show a lot of screen presence when they ride down a street like they own the damn thing, turning the heads of some grubby young hubcap thieves. Hubcap thieves! I can’t imagine a more difficult societal subsect to impress.

So we’ve got ourselves a hangout movie of sorts as we watch Johnny and Benny and Zipco (Michael Shannon, who’s been in every Nichols movies) and Brucie (Damon Herriman) ride around and do manly, sometimes violent stuff, while Kathy puzzles over why a buncha guyz who don’t like follerin’ roolz ended up makin’ a buncha roolz for theirselfs. The Vandals end up being so popular with the fat-tailpipe types, Johnny says OK to expanding, creating chapters in Milwaukee and elsewhere. Their notoriety stretches pretty far, too, because Funny Sonny (Norman Reedus) hears about it all the way out in California, and rides in to cuss ‘n’ booze with the fellas. And the bigger they get, the less Johnny can control the new guys, who like to smoke pot more than they like to drink, which reminded me of how Lemmy Kilmister got kicked out of Hawkwind because he did different drugs than the other guys, so he rewrote rock ‘n’ roll history by starting Motörhead. Meanwhile, Danny keeps hanging out with the Vandals, and Kathy starts wondering if any of this is any good for anybody, especially after Benny got the crap kicked out of him by those two guys in the bahh, and ended up in the hospital with a smashed-up foot. Do these guys have nowhere to go but nowhere? Kinda seems like it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Nichols has openly shared the influence Goodfellas had on this film, so mix that with overbaked Fargo-refugee Doncha Know accents, some Peter Fonda motorcycle pictures (The Wild Angels and of course Easy Rider) and, apologies for this one, Every Which Way But Loose, albeit minus the hijinks of Clyde the orangutan, who effed with the biker-gang idiots righteously enough to endlessly entertain my seven-year-old HBO-watching self.

Performance Worth Watching: Supporting players Herriman and Shannon each get a scene or two allowing them to suggest some depth of character in a movie that’s otherwise full of thinly rendered almost-archetypes.

Memorable Dialogue: Danny gets to the heart of the Vandals’ reason for forming:

Brucie: Obscenity and motorcycles travel hand in hand. That’s what everybody thinks, anyway.

Danny: Why?

Brucie: I guess everybody needs somebody to pick on. Can you think of anyone better than us?

Sex and Skin: None. I never knew celibacy was such a big part of biker-gang culture.

Our Take: OK, so they drink and they fight and they drink and they ride and they drink and they drink and so what? The Bikeriders is a can of beef stew that’s short on beef and watery of gravy. Its depiction of going-nowhere masculinity wants to be funny and wants to be serious but struggles to be either. It doesn’t click tonally. There’s a lack of narrative drive, and the characters are stuck between the gears of a film that isn’t sure whether it wants to be an easy-flow hangout movie or a plot-driven drama. It feels exaggerated, like Nichols is trying to elevate the story to American-legend status, a fable of sorts, about how you start something and lose control of it once it gets too big to handle (like, I dunno, capitalism, or America itself maybe?). And cut with a misdirected Comer performance that’s all bugged-out eyes and works over a caricature of a Midwestern accent like it’s a heavy bag, it never quite feels real. 

You get the sense that it wants to be a mid-century Fight Club where men with Not Much try to create something for themselves, an ideology or worldview. But what that is, the movie never makes clear, or even really implies. Neo-anarchy, maybe; maybe the idea is that they didn’t know either, and that’s why control slips away from them. We never get a sense of what they think about the laws of the country, and whether they exist uneasily inside them or purposely outside them, and if Nichols intends to embed any implications in this story, they never fully take root. A smidgen of cursory research tells us the real-life Outlaws got involved in the drug and weapons trade (yes, all the stuff we saw on Sons of Anarchy), and the movie characters’ intent seems to be hey let’s look cool and hang out and fart and cuss like real men, until ideas about loyalty get twisted and transmogrify into violence. 

“I like to be dirty” is what one guy, Cockroach (Emory Cohen), says at the onset, and the movie never really gets any deeper than that, which is disappointing. What makes these guys cry? There are instances here, but they’re unconvincing. They’re larger than life, poster-icons whose all-too-brief forays into tangible emotion don’t stick. Hardy assumes his Mumblemaster mode (see: Gotti, The Dark Knight Rises), Butler – in an inconsistent “lead” role that’s frustratingly inconsistent – does little beyond pose and brood, the inarguably talented relative newcomer Faist doesn’t have nearly enough to do and a colorful supporting cast functions as little more than an audacious display of nasty teeth and greezy hair. “Just go someplace” is Benny’s M.O., and that’s the movie’s too. But without a destination in mind, “someplace” isn’t anyplace particularly noteworthy. The movie seems as narratively lost as its protagonists.

Our Call: I’m bummed to say The Bikeriders isn’t nearly as good as it should be, especially considering the talent involved. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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