The Bikeriders (2023) (2024)

This is our family. You and me kid. Suburban Chicago, 1965: Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer) meets Benny Cross (Austin Butler) a hotheaded member of the Vandals Motorcycle Club in a bar. He protects her from unwanted attention. She marries him just five weeks later. Photography student Danny Lyon (Mike Faist)travels with and interviews the Vandals. He learns that founder Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy) was inspired to create the club after watching Marlon Brando’sThe Wild One on TV. Johnny’s leadership is challenged when he rebuffs a Vandal’s suggestion that new chapters be allowed to form. They engage in a fist fight which Johnny wins; he reestablishes his authority and grants permission to expand the club any way. New chapters begin to form across the Midwest. 1969: Benny is attacked by two men in a bar for wearing hiscolours; his foot is nearly severed by a shovel during the assault when his tendon is cut. Johnny and the Vandals burn down the bar and Johnny orders his second in command Brucie (Damon Herriman) that the perpetrators be brutalised. He pressures Benny to come to a motorcycle rally picnicbefore he is fully healed, to Kathy’s objection. Johnny quietly offers Benny leadership of the club when he steps down but Benny rejects it. A 20-year-old delinquent known as The Kid (Toby Wallace) asks Johnny to allow him and friends to join the Vandals but is rejected when he expresses willingness to abandon his friends for membership. He stabs Johnny, who beats him up and warns him to not come back. 1973: Danny interviews Kathy about the fate of the Vandals following the demise of Brucie … Knife or fists? Adapted by writer/director Jeff Nichols from the titular 1967 photobook by New Journalism exemplar Danny Lyon, this has the sheen of cultural anthropology but ultimately retreats to a kind of unknowability and even enigma, figured in the character of Benny. We already know Butler is beautiful and a star, here he presents as a kind of metaphor, a bastion of something akin to Kerouac’s traveller, a suburban roadrunner existing as an aside from the troubled lore of bikers yet the only one of this motley crew who dares to wear his colours outside the gang. In movie biker mythology the queer erotica of Kenneth Anger looms large but here the girl group songs that lend Scorpio Rising [itself paid homage by Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery’s The Loveless] its tanginess of place and time are repurposed into heteronormative camaraderie and criminality without irony: they literally tell the story and indicate the sensibility which is dominated by regret and loss, the transformation from innocence to bloody experience. A potted history of biker movies brings us from the exploitationers of Corman et al through Easy Rider but Hunter S. Thompson’s account of his spell with Sonny Barger’s Hell’s Angels reminds us of the dangers they pose and it is that strand that dictates the outcome (Lyon asked Thompson for advice about embedding himself with a gang but ignored it). Through the Midwestern twang of Kathy (we can’t help waiting for Comer to revert into her legendary TV killer Killing Eve‘s Villanelle) we witness their evolution from a loyal part-time crew who like to drink beer through a takeover that involves horrific violence and eventually lawbreaking connected to familial dysfunction when interloper The Kid views domestic violence as normal and brings his worldview to the street in devastating fashion. Kathy’s insider-outsider status lends ironic perspective. Talking to sympathetic Danny, she asks rhetorically how guys who can’t stick to the rules the first thing they do is make rules. In the post-Vietnam era the new generation of bikers turns to drug dealing and murder, pitching the original gang as old school apolitical (for the most part) working class rebels. There are moments of humour – when the guys are introduced in single shot scenes[replicating Lyon’s photos] and co*ckroach (Emory Cohen) defends his liking for eating bugs; when disturbed Zipco (Michael Shannon) is interviewed by Danny and he decries pinko students who wear shorts and protest against Nam when he was too disturbed to serve his country then Danny informs him he’s a student. It’s all framed by the assault on Benny in a bar, an action that leads to a serious act of revenge, viewed by police who stand on the sidelines, wisely declining to intervene. The sense of nostalgia is expressed through the autumnal colours of Adam Stone’s cinematography, glorying in the open road when Benny escapes the police only to run out of gas, complemented by the dingy interiors which have the ring of truth in an authentic mise en scene. Benny and Johnny are joint protagonists and Benny’s taciturnity is juxtaposed with Johnny’s often silent role as leader of the pack – motivated by watching Brando on TV in his lounge but driven by something like love for his fellow man, a monosyllabic and fatalistic role Hardy was born to play. When Brucie dies in a stupidly everyday crash 68 minutes in it is true tragedy; the rejecting of the gang’s guard of honour by his parents is horrible. Friendship cannot protect these guys from quotidian melancholy despite their mythical reputation. Benny’s inarticulacy and physical withdrawal might be viewed as a narrative failure however Butler’s capacity to embody a world of feelings without speaking (while Kathy verbalises for everybody and tries to save him from self-destruction) confirms that this is a performer who has unmatchable screen presence. Hardy acts his socks off; Butler simply is. The freedom of the open road, the throb of the engines, the thrill of the chase, they are all here, replenished by a mysterious persona for the ages – a man who would be king. The motorcycle boy reigns. You’ll have to kill me to get this jacket off me

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