The Bikeriders (2023/2024) ***½
Holy shit, it’s a biker movie! Here in the summer of 2024 (or 2023, if you caught it on the festival circuit), it’s a no-screwing-around, straight-out-of-1968 biker movie! I can’t even remember the last time one of those found its way into theaters. And when I say that The Bikeriders is straight out of 1968, I mean that in a fairly literal sense. This movie is loosely based on the book of the same name by gonzo photojournalist Danny Lyon, which was originally released that year. Lyon’s version documented the four years he spent in company with the Outlaws, the Chicago-based motorcycle club that became the principal rivals of the more famous Hell’s Angels. The cinematic quasi-adaptation, written and directed by Jeff Nichols, shifts the timeframe a bit (1965-1973, instead of 1963-1967), substitutes a fictional gang called the Vandals, and departs freely and unapologetically from the facts as Lyon recorded them for the sake of both drama and narrative effect, but its basis in the book is unmistakable just the same. Crucially, that applies not just to the book’s subject matter, but to its perspective as well. Like Lyon, Nichols approaches the biker counterculture with affection and affinity, but without necessarily buying into its attitudes or assumptions. The result is a film in the same spirit as Sandy Harbutt’s Stone or Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia— a development as welcome and unexpected as the emergence of a new biker movie in the first place!
Another thing that Nichols carried over from the book is the notion of a writer embedded with the gang, taking notes, photos, and tape-recorded interviews, although this Danny (Wilding’s Michael Faist) appears to be a biker who caught a persistent case of ambition rather than a journalist who got counterculture-curious. Surprisingly, though, Danny isn’t The Bikeriders’ viewpoint character. That role falls instead to his most talkative interview subject, a young woman named Kathy (Jodie Comer, from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) who fell into the orbit of the Vandals when she fell in love with Benny (Austin Butler, of Dune, Part Two and The Dead Don’t Die), a member of the gang’s inner circle. A friend of Kathy’s had brought her to a party one night at the Chicago dive bar that functioned as the Vandals’ clubhouse, and although she initially found the bikers strange and frightening, her first look at Benny struck sparks for the both of them. He took her for a ride on his chopper, then stood watch across the street from her house for a day and a night like either a Medieval troubadour or a great, big freak, depending on your point of view. The latter stunt provoked Kathy’s boyfriend to move out in a transport of jealous rage, but I’m thinking that alone tells us the relationship already wasn’t working out.
Through Kathy, Danny learns how Johnny (Tom Hardy, from Star Trek: Nemesis and Minotaur), a modestly prosperous working-class family man, was inspired by a television screening of The Wild One to quit the dirt-bike-racing club he’d co-founded, and to start up the Vandals with several of the old group’s more temperamentally restless members. She describes the gang’s ways for Danny’s tape machine (although Danny himself presumably knows them perfectly well by now), remarking particularly on the paradoxical eagerness of these men who can’t follow a single one of society’s rules to swear themselves to codes and customs far more binding, albeit of their own design. She tells how the club expanded throughout the second half of the 1960’s, attracting cyclists from as far away as California, and how the Vandal name became so famous and respected that bikers in other territories began petitioning to launch their own local chapters. (It speaks to Johnny’s understanding of his followers’ psychology that the first such applicant [played by Happy Anderson] gains permission to set up the Milwaukee Vandals only after Johnny bests him decisively in a knockdown-dragout duel.) And intertwined with the story of the Vandals’ rising fortunes, Kathy recounts the rather stormier tale of her marriage to Benny, an incorrigible rebel and troublemaker even among troublemaking rebels. Finally, when Danny returns to catch up with Kathy several years after drifting away from both the Vandals and the larger cycle-riding subculture, she spins the saddest yarn of all, about how Johnny progressively lost control of both himself and his small, strange empire. The decline began with the accidental death of Brucie (Damon Herriman, from House of Wax and 100 Bloody Acres), Johnny’s longtime friend and right-hand man; gathered speed as Johnny and Benny’s mutual admiration drove each of them to ever-greater heights of recklessness; and climaxed with the advent of a new generation of bikers more committed to wildness, outlawry, and ungovernability than the old guard ever countenanced, even in their most extravagant fantasies.
The secret to a really good counterculture movie, I think, is to take seriously the question of what leads people to reject mainstream value systems, and to seek others to erect in their place. I’m not even sure it’s necessary to answer that question, which, after all, is obviously dependent to a great extent upon individual personalities. The filmmakers just have to acknowledge that those who align themselves with a counterculture get something meaningful out of it that their larger society wasn’t providing them. The Bikeriders is almost entirely about why these men (and, to a lesser extent, the women associated with them) are the way they are, and Nichols takes the time and makes the effort to propose about as many possible reasons as the film has major characters. For instance, Cal (Boyd Holbrook, of The Predator and The Host), the mad scientist of the Vandals, sees motorcycles as a creative outlet. No two choppers are alike, for all that they start off as mass-produced industrial goods, and there’s a powerful subversive pleasure in imposing handmade individuality on a machine put together on an assembly line. Vipco (Michael Shannon, from The Shape of Water and Night’s End), a son of Latvian immigrants with strongly-held opinions on international communism, relates an origin story, by turns amusingly absurd and achingly sad, about being turned away from an army recruitment office as an “undesirable character.” For Cockroach (Emory Cohen, who played Varg Vikernes in Lords of Chaos, of all things!), the gang’s bug-eating class clown, who’s been riding with Johnny since their racing-club days, it’s a matter of friendship and personal loyalty, together with the simple joys of speed and the open road. His commitment to the Vandals as an alternative way of life is so superficial that he eventually winds up as a motorcycle cop— but only after moving far enough away from Chicago that he’ll never be forced to bust any of his old comrades. Then there’s the unnamed youth (Toby Wallace, of Boys in the Trees) who turns everything sour in the end. This kid is so desperately hungry for belonging that he’ll literally kill in order to obtain it.
Naturally, though, it’s Johnny, Benny, and Kathy whose motivations Nichols examines most closely. From their points of view, The Bikeriders is something that we really don’t see often enough: a love triangle opposing different kinds of love, making different and ultimately irreconcilable claims on the participants. Although it briefly looks as though Johnny and Benny are destined to become rivals for Kathy’s affections, the real competition is between Johnny and Kathy over Benny. Remember what inspired Johnny to start the Vandals in the first place, and remember also The Wild One’s most famous exchange of dialogue: when asked what he’s rebelling against, Marlon Brando’s character laconically replies, “What have you got?” In the final assessment, however, Johnny has too many ties to the normal world for that attitude ever to be anything more than aspirational for him. Benny, though? He’s the real deal. He’s defiance and self-determination all the way down to his marrow, and what is there in the world more romantic than that? Benny is everything that Johnny wishes he could be— and by having Benny in his orbit, Johnny is able to borrow just a little bit more of the power of Not Giving a Fuck for himself. And thanks to the Vandals’ code of cockeyed chivalry, Benny is able to be what he is— what he must and can only be— without paying the price of permanent solitude which the uncompromisingly self-willed usually incur. For Kathy, meanwhile, Benny represents a form and degree of excitement and freedom that she never knew existed. Like Johnny, she’s able to lead vicariously through her connection to Benny a life that her own resources of mind and temperament could never support. But Kathy doesn’t want to be Benny the way Johnny does. She wants to have him like any normal wife has her husband, and it’s plain to her that the way Johnny and Benny egg each other on to ever more drastic risk-taking is a threat to that. Eventually, though, the mere fact that the two people closest to him have formed designs on his life can’t help but drive Benny away from both of them.
What’s truly remarkable about The Bikeriders is that Nichols never treats the suffering that Johnny, Benny, and Kathy cause themselves and each other as anyone’s fault. In particular, he resists with a doggedness akin to Benny’s own the temptation to portray Kathy as a nagging voice of conformist responsibility. Kathy never seeks to change Benny, even when she resorts to some very underhanded tactics in the hope of separating him from the gang. Indeed, the very possibility of anyone changing Benny would spoil what makes him so attractive to her. It’s just that Kathy doesn’t want to see him dead or in prison, and she knows that that’s exactly where Benny’s road is leading, even if he himself can’t or won’t look that far ahead. This might be the smartest, most commendable choice Nichols makes in the entire film, for it proves once and for all that he truly does understand the value system of an outlaw motorcycle club, and is prepared to let it speak for itself.
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