Adapted from the Danny Lyon photobook which sought to “record and glorify the life of the American bikerider,” Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders captures the same rich images of the lives of an outlaw motorcycle club from Chicago. The film lifts the pictures from off the page and puts them into motion through the prominent and handsome cinematography of Adam Stone. It’s not about motorcycles but the lifestyle they promote, surrounding the heavily fictionalized story of the Chicago Vandals. This real-life 1960s motorcycle club is given a conventionally Scorsese-like background story about the rise and fall of the club through what it meant to its members, as the crew develops comradery through their customized choppers winding down flattened Illinois cornfields. Together. They roar through the expanses of Midwestern nothingness together, filling the nothingness with a certain somethingness: a sense of belonging that these rebellious outsiders would never find anywhere else.
What’s interesting about the narrative framework is that it is not driven by the bikeriders at all. Instead, it is driven by the account of Jodie Comer’s Kathy, who falls in with the bike club, after they essentially choose her. They put her on the back of a bike and her life is changed in a whirlwind journey through the culture, she attaches instantly to Austin Butler’s Benny. Hand in glove, she quickly adopts the lifestyle and ingratiates herself with the club. Kathy tells her story to photojournalist Danny, modeled after Danny Lyon himself and played by Mike Faist, who records her tell-all anecdote of how she experienced events, using the photographs of the real-life Danny Lyon as a launching point to create a whole new narrative fiction. Jeff Nichols has wanted to tell this story for years and the wrote the story out of pure passion and drive to see it realized. It comes out with all of that passion in-tact; you can feel the love for the characters, for their Midwest bikeriding culture, for what they all must mean to each other.
The acting is perfectly pitched. Jodie Comer gives so much. Everything turns around her narration and keyed-in performance which bounces so well off of Austin Butler’s unfuckwithable assured cool, channeling all the cool-guy actors that proceeded him, a bit James Dean, a bit Marlon Brando, entirely compelling. Tom Hardy, in turn, gives a generous performance as Johnny, who acts as the leader and father figure of the tribe — we love him right off, his character in the text also literally inspired to start the club by the Brando movie The Wild One (1951), and so, the construction and character of his club matches the laidback joyride nature of that club, Brando’s character also notably called Johnny in that film. One exchange from it is featured as the impetuous for forming the club. “What are you against?” Brando is asked. “What have you got?” he says, and that lays the groundwork for everything this crew stands for. They fight for each other and fight for the freedom of their lifestyles but most of all, they fight because it’s something to do, and something to rebel against and to cultivate a very American individuality within a collective group.
The Bikeriders hums onward with a clean storytelling focus. Where it dips is in the third act. While the structure is assured and ready to support the story that follows, there does not seem to be an ending that has been worked out first. It seems as though Jeff Nichols wrote the story linearly and got everything he wanted across in the first two acts and then had to settle on a conventional sort of denouement for how this kind of story typically ends. One of the best scenes of the movie is just Butler’s Benny riding out in the fields, alone, breezing past the corn stocks, and how the movie captures the bike breaking down, running out of gas, and the feeling of empty loneliness, caught out alone and without the crew, the bike failing on its own where it would otherwise roar along with the pack. That’s how the movie goes too: it’s a beautiful and confident ride that just runs out of gas, but it’s still making this sweet overall statement, is still invested in the core themes, and has somewhere to go, it just doesn’t suit the rest of the buildup, wherein we are so invested in these people because of what they mean to the people around them. Once it tries to pull them away from the group and individualize their stakes, it peters out and just has to end in a contrived and expected way. Too bad, it’s a great movie that deserves a great wrap-up that pulls in all of the themes.
A passion project for Jeff Nichols, The Bikeriders exudes a love for the subject and the characters within. It is a lovely movie about some cool guys and how they pluck this young woman and this photographer out of the doldrums of their plain lives and enliven them with everything good about motorcycles. The Bikeriders presents as an act of love, expanding Danny Lyon’s great photographs into an expanded, living, and breathing series of images that create a compelling story about bikes and the people who ride them. The motorcycle remains the great American symbol of freedom, and independence, and a sharp subject to form a movie around. The Bikeriders extends the American fiction about bikes by crafting a character-driven story led by fantastic acting and images that resonate and expand some celebrated photography. The audience feels embedded in the lifestyle and bikeriding and lets in on something that often feels self-contained and hard to crack, by focusing on two perspectives from just on the outside, which become audience inserts and create a direct and lasting relationship between the audience and the text. Hop on the bike. You won’t regret where it takes you.