By Andrew Montiveo.
Such subtlety has become increasingly rare….”
Popular culture has long relished the outlaw motorcyclist, and Hollywood embraced the outlaw motorcyclist soon after his postwar emergence, mainly due to a number of displaced veterans returning from WWII. Early exploitation cinema profited from the public hysteria over these latter-day marauders with such titles as Motorcycle Gang (1957) and Dragstrip Riot (1958). No less than American film’s king of schlock, Roger Corman, played a part in morphing the biker into prime grindhouse material. His Wild Angels (1966), which drove Peter Fonda on the path to sub-genre icon, hit theatres at a pivotal moment when the unsanctioned moto club, fueled by a number of disaffected veterans returning from Vietnam, veered from greaser pastime into organized crime.
Writer-director Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders tells the story of an Upper Midwestern outfit during this transitional period. The plot centers on Kathy (Jodie Comer), a Chicago homemaker who leaves a life of predictable convention to be with an enigmatic rider named Benny (Austin Butler). Benny is a recent recruit with a local club called the Vandals, founded and led by the seemingly gruff, yet actually contemplative, Johnny (Tom Hardy). Through recollections with a young documentarian, Kathy and other club members describe a familial saga of joy, mischief, and change emblematic of the 1960s.
Nichols based his script loosely on Danny Lyon’s 1967 photographic book of the same name. Lyon accompanied the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club in the early 1960s, keeping touch with its members throughout the decade. Some of Lyon’s black-and-white photos have since become iconic among rocker, bodgie, and greaser revivalists. Indeed, Nichols pays homage to these icons by recreating those moments in action. He keeps a further tie to Lyon’s work by having the young documentarian, Danny (Mike Faist), serve as the audience’s navigator, initiating each chapter of the story through interviews.
The Bikeriders continues Nichols’s penchant for outcast-driven narrative. Take Shelter (2011) focused on a modern-day apocalyptic prophet rejected by his community and doubted by his kin. Mud (2012) centered on a troubled, yet charismatic, fugitive feared by society but befriended by local youths. Loving (2016), perhaps Nichols’s most acclaimed drama, examined the real-life case of Richard and Mildred Loving, a prosecuted (and persecuted) inter-racial couple whose federal case served as a breakthrough step in desegregation. Clearly, the filmmaker bears a fondness for characters who move against the grain.
Nichols’s choice of Vandals for the club’s name is fitting. Before it became a byword for miscreance, a vandal described migratory “barbarians” of Late Antiquity, many former veterans of a civilized empire that looked down upon them. Nichols’s Vandals, like their ancient forebears, resist the tight and narrow conventions demanded of them, instead charting their own course. Johnny, this iteration’s Genseric, forms the club after watching The Wild One (1953) on television. With their custom bikes, leather jackets, and greased hair, Johnny’s Vandals carve out notoriety in their small corner of Chicago. For all the ire they receive from regular Chicagoans, hindsight allows the audience to see the riders’ mode of rebellion as almost quaint. The Vandals don’t seek to destroy normality: They only want to live outside of it.
Benny typifies the archetype. He hails from more “respectable” stock than his fellow clubmates. But he eschews routine for impulse. He marries Kathy on a whim, but avoids any talk of truly settling down. Conversely, though Benny sees Johnny as a patriarch, he refuses to consider succession because of the responsibility it entails. Obligation, even more than genuine personal harm, hovers over him as a lingering terror.
Benny soon becomes a point of contention in a tug of war between the film’s figurative drivers. Kathy seeks to pull him back into the normalcy he rejected, wanting to tame Benny’s rootlessness in exchange for grounded stability. She vies with an aging Johnny, who sees Benny as the brave and cool figure who can helm the Vandals through changing and increasingly dangerous currents.
The clock ticks on Johnny’s reign, and he knows it. Outside forces have mestastized the Vandals from a local club of countercultural enthusiasts to a regional confederacy of outright malefactors. His ad hoc, almost carefree, management sufficed in the early and middle 1960s. By late decade, the group has expanded into chapters across the Upper Midwest, so many that Johnny has lost track. In one scene, Johnny finds himself at a regional gathering surrounded by unrecognized faces–hairy and unkempt, quietly enraged at some imperceptible force. These are the latest recruits: hardened addicts, erratic veterans, and cutthroat pretenders.
Harkens back to a moment when Hollywood found reward in smaller, more pensive productions….”
Nichols’s adaptation is faithful to Lyon’s documentary chronicle, but such dedication has its faults. The narrative is staggered, leaping from one period to another. The viewer relies on Danny’s interviewee (often Kathy) to describe an off-screen change in the club rather than convey the dynamic shift before the audience. The viewer hears that the club grew uncontrollably, but doesn’t see that growth happen. Likewise, the viewer hears how a new generation of members polluted the outfit, but doesn’t see that pollution develop. The viewer only witnesses the outcome, not the transition.
The old gang is suddenly outnumbered and eclipsed by the volatile new. This new breed shows its danger when members batter an original member and try to rape Kathy, all without consequence. Rather, the consequence hits Kathy, Johnny, and Benny’s triumvirate. The violent episodes create an irreparable breach in Benny and Johnny’s friendship. The former considers Johnny’s toleration of the culprits as sacrilege, even though it was Johnny, who in Benny’s absence, intervened to stop Kathy’s rape from happening. More perplexing is Benny’s reaction: He cuts ties with Johnny and Kathy, entering a self-imposed exile. It’s a confounding act given that Kathy’s exploited vulnerability sparked Benny’s fury. Why heighten it?
Yet it’s Johnny who bears the fatal ramification for this schism: He falls to a young and ruthless upstart, a nihilistic insurgent with no interest in honor or fraternity. It’s a fitting end: He’s a relic of an age passed. Nichols references this in the film’s epilogue, showing one of the club’s former members (Funny Sonny, played by Norman Reedus) reduced to promoting Easy Rider (1969), a picture that serves as much an inauguration of a new epoch as it does closing another. Word of Johnny’s demise, in turn, propels Benny to return to Kathy, abandon his nomadism, and submit to convention at last.
Where Nichols’s faithfulness to Lyon’s imagery stands strongest is in the film’s aesthetics. Nichols and longtime collaborator and cinematographer Adam Stone replicate Lyon’s most striking photographs. Benny brooding over a pool table in a smoky bar. Another of him riding across a bridge, his head turned to see what’s behind. Two fellow clubmates, leathers donned, posing awkwardly in front of an old building. Yet where Lyon’s icons lay still and monochrome, Nichols and Stone bring them to motion in desaturated, low-contrasting colors. The imagery is too faded to be rich, too choreographed to be natural. Like the morals of its characters, The Bikeriders’ style lies in a hazy marrow between Hollywood fluff and indie realist, opting for a neorealistic style over a formalist one. The dearth of computer-generated actions and scenery is refreshing, but not enough to qualify the film as an authentically rugged portal to a vanished age.
Far from a landmark work of cinema, The Bikeriders is nonetheless a welcome detour from a cursory norm. Perhaps that, more than any biker on screen, is the starkest counter-cultural aspect about the film.
Andrew Montiveo is a Los Angeles-based writer. He has contributed to Bright Lights Film Journal and Cineaste.