The Bikeriders review: Wannabe outlaw film is a weekend warrior at heart

Among the first things we see in The Bikeriders is Benny’s jacket. Posted up at a dusty Chicago dive bar, back to camera, Benny (Austin Butler in a movie star performance that proves Elvis was no fluke) sips his whiskey and smokes his cigarette. Two local boys ask him to remove his colors. “You’d have to kill me to get this jacket off,” he replies. It won’t get much more complicated than that.

The spirit of two-wheeled liberation thrums in every frame of The Bikeriders, pumping like gasoline through Benny’s veins. As the tight-lipped embodiment of the mythic American biker, Benny is the center of a love triangle between co-stars Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy, who, amid the actors’ Midwestern accent showdown, vie for Benny’s affections and the soul of the American road. But neither married life with Kathy (Comer) nor running the fictional Chicago Vandals motorcycle club with Johnny (Hardy) matter to Benny. He just wants to ride. Across his epic and surprisingly chaste narrative, writer-director Jeff Nichols presents a lively and occasionally beautiful adaptation of Danny Lyons’ 1967 coffee table book, but The Bikeriders sticks to the main roads. It is too conventional to be an outlaw, but Nichols and the cast have a blast pretending.

Sticking with the ‘60s setting of his previous film, 2016’s Loving, Nichols frames the story around a pair of interviews with Kathy in 1965 and 1974. The young Wellesian reporter organizing the story and conducting interviews, Danny (Mike Faist, playing a surrogate for the book’s author), dips in and out to see what the boys are up to, but Kathy’s testimony is most of the ride. Through her eyes, we see the rise and fall of her husband’s biker gang, but Nichols’ simplistic depiction of the group’s exploits and her romance with Benny undercuts the reality.

We meet Kathy in 1965, folding laundry with her girlfriends as if she were another homemaker instead of the wife of a crime syndicate’s heir apparent. It wasn’t always so heavy. She recalls being dragged to a biker bar where she meets Benny. He doesn’t make chit-chat, but Kathy doesn’t need much convincing to jump on the back of his Harley. In the film’s most revealing sequence, Kathy clings to Benny, her face against his shoulder as they cruise the freeway, while a murder of Vandals fans out behind him. She feels protected by the power of his bike and his gang, with the Shangri-Las’ “Out In The Streets” overtaking the soundtrack. The song is a key to understanding the film and Kathy’s perspective: “He used to act bad / Used to, but he quit / It makes me so sad ‘cause I know that he did it for me.” The song’s opening chorus of ghostly girl group harmonies is an aural motif for the magic and promise of the motorcycle, haunting The Bikeriders with a tinge of regret that these guys don’t exist anymore.

Popular culture informs how these characters understand motorcycles. Founded by Johnny, a Chicago trucker, husband, and father of two inspired by Marlon Brando in the actor’s 1953 biker breakout, The Wild One, the Vandals started as an excuse for local motorcycle racers, mechanics, and outcasts to drink beer. The Wild One looms large over The Bikeriders, sharing plot beats, character names, and, most importantly, the Vandals’ empty ethos. Like Brando in The Wild One, Johnny isn’t rebelling against anything specific. He’s simply rebelling. But as the ‘60s speed along, the Vietnam War divides wild ones and easy riders, and a new type of pot-smoking, long-haired biker drives the Vandals toward violent detours that neither Johnny nor the film can navigate. As he tries, Hardy’s performance becomes squirrely and paranoid, a collection of tics that the stone-faced Butler, who disappears for swaths of the movie, juxtaposes better than most. Like Kathy, he’s caught between worlds: a normal life at home or one gripping a gun.

It’s easy to see how one could get wrapped up in the Vandals’ chaos. With Adam Stone’s lush cinematography and Julie Monroe’s brisk editing, Nichols frequently picks up good vibes. That’s not especially hard with this cast. Boyd Holbrook, who spent the last few years playing elemental serial killers on Sandman and Justified, takes a sensitive turn as Cal, a Vandal whose motorcycle love is as mechanical as it is philosophical. The darkly comic aspiring soldier, Zipco (Nichols regular Michael Shannon), is an unpredictable hang, but his revealing campfire rants express the group’s inner turmoil. These are lonely, alienated guys in need of community, even for a friendly mud wrestling bout. But Johnny can see the landscape change when “Funny” Sonny (Norman Reedus) rolls into town with his scraggly hair and rotting teeth. Brando is out; Dennis Hopper is in.

While the cast fills in some of the missing pieces, portions of The Bikeriders’ script go woefully underdeveloped. Despite the smoldering looks and shotgun wedding, Kathy and Benny have no heat. Their sexless romance amounts to numerous scenes of Kathy trying to convince him not to ride, failing, and half-heartedly arguing for him to change. Far more interested in the homosocial bonding of its bike riders, the film’s sexiest moment comes from Johnny and Benny. Maybe Kathy was a little too bashful to share things with Danny. Sadly, she’s the only woman Nichols grants a voice. The other biker wives are nothing more than coat hangers for leather jackets.

Other key details about the group go unmentioned. Nichols whitewashes the group’s ideological leanings to make the film more palatable. The period touches, including the white supremacist iconography adorning their vests, require some explanation the film isn’t prepared to deliver. Benny’s willing to die for the Totenkopf on his jacket. It’s the first thing we learn about him. What those gang colors mean could’ve deepened and complicated our view of Benny. As it stands, he’s an empty vessel; the patches, meaningless style.

The Bikeriders presents an open road that’s always calling. Nichols effectively communicates that power through bikes that inspire both freedom and violence. But his mythmaking dulls their riders’ edge. Nichols wants the allure of exhaust to enchant moviegoers with an eternal biker symbol—a man with no name who drives on the wind. But that symbol is on the road to nowhere. Through rose-colored glasses, Nichols directs a nostalgic eulogy for a simple, uncomplicated biker that never existed. He built an enviable chopper without enough gas in the tank to get somewhere real.