Film Review: "The Bikeriders"
Jeff Nichols' biker melodrama is paean to a vanished time and a vanished culture.
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I wasn’t sure quite what to expect going into The Bikeriders, the new biker melodrama from Jeff Nichols, but I found it to be one of those films that is full of surprises. It ended up being both like and unlike its trailer. It is by turns brutal, beautiful, and poignant, with some remarkable acting from its three leads and some powerful visuals. It’s a bit of a love song to a biker culture that no longer exists and, while it might seem strange to think of a biker film as being about the loss of innocence, that is exactly what The Bikeriders becomes by its end, and it’s what makes it such an extraordinarily powerful story.
At the heart of the film is the fraught relationship among three people. Johnny (Tom Hardy, doing his best Marlon Brando impression), the leader of a motorcycle gang known as the Vandals; Benny (Austin Butler at his brooding and pouty best), Johnny’s protege; and Kathy (Jodie Comer doing her best Midwest Mom impression), Benny’s wife who resents the influence the gang has over his life and sense of self. Their story is interwoven with the broader changes facing both American society and biker culture in particular, as a code of honor is largely left behind in favor of outright criminality and lawlessness. Kathy is largely the one that guides the film’s narrative, as she is being interviewed by Mike Faist’s Danny Lyon for a book he’s compiling on the bikers.
Admittedly, the screenplay is a bit of a mess, as other critics have noted. There were points where it was hard to see how all of the pieces fit together, particularly since we frequently cut away to see Kathy delivering her own interpretation of events and people. Sometimes it seems as if we’re supposed to be cheering for Kathy and Benny to really begin their lives out from beneath Johnny’s shadow and that of the club, while at others it seems like we’re witnessing a domestic melodrama, in which Kathy and Johnny are vying for Benny’s soul (not that anyone could blame them). A little more finessing of the screenplay, I think, would have found a more effective way of balancing these various elements and allowing them to cohere into a cohesive whole.
The film does succeed, however, thanks to both the performances and its sense of emotional authenticity. To be sure, your mileage may vary when it comes to the accents that everyone seems determined to use–to my ears, Austin Butler’s sounded the least forced, though that might be because of the three leads he’s the most taciturn–but there’s no question that the film succeeds thanks to the undeniable screen presence of Comer, Hardy, and Butler.
As she has shown in her appearances on both the big and the small screens, Comer has the ability to capture women who are as complicated and emotionally complex as their male counterparts. She’s an outsider to the biker world that Johnny and Benny inhabit, but she does her best to fit in, even though she knows that she will never quite understand what it is that draws him to this world. From the moment that they meet in a seedy biker bar, however, their chemistry is as vibrant and vital as the motorcycles themselves, crackling with intensity and power. As time goes by, however, and Benny’s scars add up, she becomes ever more disenchanted by his continued loyalty to the biker gang, and an attempted sexual assault is (rightly) the final nail in the coffin.
Tom Hardy likewise turns in a performance that, in less capable hands, could easily have slid right into parody. To be sure, there is something more than a bit ridiculous about the accent he adopts, which has something of the nasally whine of Brando, but despite this Johnny comes to be a sort of tragic character in his own right, the type of man who has long sought for camaraderie and a destiny greater than just being a trucker. Despite his masculine bona fides–this is a man who’s willing to play dirty in a knife fight if it means that he’ll win–and his code of honor (he’ll face any man in a challenge), he’s not enough to stem the tides of change. He ultimately becomes a sort of doomed King Lear-like figure, condemned to watch his gang be taken over by young men he cannot control, until he loses his own life when he goes to a gunfight with nothing more than a knife. It’s an ignominious end for a man such as Johnny, and it’s meant to stand in for the demise of male honor on the altar of male psychopathy.
And then there’s Austin Butler. I don’t know how to put it other than that he simply radiates sex appeal in this movie. Seeing his bare arms and his pouty lips and his smoldering stare are more than enough to set even the most jaded heart aflutter. Yet there’s vulnerability there, too, and it’s easy to see why Kathy falls in love with him the moment they meet, and why she stays in love with him despite all of his misdeeds and his refusal to take her side against Johnny and the rest of the Vandals. Of the three main characters he’s the enigmatic, and while he’s always willing to jump feet first into a fight, and while it’s clear that there’s a lost soul beneath that handsome exterior, I don’t think we emerge from this film really knowing anything about him. In the film’s last scene, he has settled into a comfortable suburban life with Kathy but, as he gazes off into the distance, we know that he’s thinking of a once-glamorous past and the life he left behind.
Moreover, The Bikeriders does leave us with a profound sense of nostalgia for a bygone age of biker gangs. It’s not that the era ruled over by Johnny was a particularly good one–it had its fair share of violence and folly and darkness–but there was at least a sense that they were all bound by a code of honor and ethics that kept the most unruly forces at bay. The new era ushered in by the Kid, however, is one of almost unrelenting violence and brutality. This is hardly surprising, since he begins his reign by shooting Johnny in cold blood. Kathy and Benny might be safe in their new life, but the film leaves us feeling more than a little sad and a little melancholic for a bygone era that existed for a brief time before being swept away by the tide of time and history.