Yahoo Movies The Bikeriders is a cool, old-fashioned biker movie
The Bikeriders feeds off the idealised notion of the bike rider, but its romanticism doesn't last.
Jeff Nichols' new movie peels away the stereotype layer by layer, revealing generational frustrations, class struggles, the need for belonging, outcasts' traumas, toxic masculinity and the inevitable path to violence when ideals turn to ash.
Tom Hardy, Austin Butler and Jodie Comer are a winning trio in this captivating blend of 20th-century asphalt Western and brutal crime drama, inspired by Danny Lyon's 1968 photobook of the same name.
It's the coolest-looking movie of the year, even if it slightly runs out of gas towards the end.
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Set between 1965 and 1973, The Bikeriders follows a Midwestern motorcycle club known as The Vandals. The group was started by father of two Johnny (Hardy), who got the idea from Marlon Brando's foundational bike rider movie The Wild One on TV.
Who wouldn't want to be Brando's tough, leather-jacketed antihero? Ask Michael Cera's Wally in Twin Peaks: The Return.
Johnny surrounds himself with an unexpectedly sweet group of friends, who have been rejected from society just like him: easy-going resident mechanic Cal (Boyd Holbrook), bug-eating jokester Cockroach (Emory Cohen), menacing-yet-deep Zipco (Michael Shannon), ever-loyal Brucie (Damon Herriman) and kooky Funny Sonny (The Walking Dead's Norman Reedus).
The main narrator in this story, though, is non-biker Kathy (Comer), who falls madly in love with The Vandals' most mysterious and rebellious member, Benny (Butler). "It can't be love – it must be stupidity," she says, as "stupidity" leads her to become tethered to these wild but mostly melancholic bike riders.
At the centre of The Bikeriders there is a triangle that is not fuelled entirely by love, but rather desire and expectations.
Kathy wants Benny to settle down and be a family man. Johnny wants Benny to be his successor in leading The Vandals. Benny just wants to hold on tight to that foundational idea of the bike rider – a wild spirit with an open road stretching out in front of them, free from obligations or responsibilities.
Since Benny is used as a canvas for other people's projections, the character feels empty at times. Luckily, Butler's phenomenal performance offers such an irresistible sensuality that nobody could question Johnny and Kathy's unapologetic obsession with him.
While Hardy delivers a convincing performance with his broody Brando-esque routine, it's Comer's Kathy who quickly becomes the heart of the story.
Her often amusing narration of events is mostly taken from the interview recordings that Danny Lyon (a version of whom is played by Challengers' Mike Faist in the film) collected in order to create his book.
Delivered in Comer's astonishing Midwestern accent, it becomes a much-needed counterpoint to the men's unabashed masculinity.
Kathy remembers the origins of the club while folding clothes among other women in the local launderette, a fundamental female-dominated space (at that time, mind you) representing domesticity, while bike riders long for open roads and the sound of engines.
Women are relegated to their cornered spaces while they watch how it all unravels. Alas, this dichotomy is never as cleverly explored as in these initial moments.
After all, The Bikeriders focuses on dissecting the idea of masculinity, showing the good, the bad and the ugly.
Yes, the members of the gang fight for leadership in a muddy field, talk endlessly about their motorcycles and drink themselves senseless in their local bar, but they never become a caricature of themselves.
Viewers might have preconceived ideas of what a biker gang looks like, and this movie is not really interested in them. Nichols feels genuine sympathy for these characters, who are portrayed as containing a multitude of emotions and wants.
They might be trying to be Brando in The Wild One, or Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, but, in the end, the performative nature of 1960s masculinity is equally restrictive as the romantic idea of grizzled men riding their bikes into the sunset.
The Bikeriders is out now in cinemas.
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