(Jeff Nichols, 2024, USA, 116 minutes)
Since his 2008 directorial debut, Shotgun Stories, the tale of a blood feud between family factions, Arkansas-born filmmaker Jeff Nichols has been working with archetypes (as opposed to stereotypes). It isn't true of all six of his feature films, but it's true of most. Or, to put it another way, it is true of every film, but it's a more significant part of some than others.
Just as he drew from Nancy Buirski's 2011 documentary, The Loving Story, for 2016's Loving, his warm-hearted, if cool-headed profile of Richard and Mildred Loving, the couple behind the landmark Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision decriminalizing interracial marriage, he has done something similar with The Bikeriders by drawing from pre-existing material. Granted, the stakes are lower, but the canvas is wider, and he has brought actual individuals to silver screen life, unlike his first four narrative features.
Instead of a biography or a documentary, however, he has adapted a book of photographs. In so doing, he has also inserted the photojournalist behind the 1968 project, Danny Lyon (played by West Side Story and Challengers star Mike Faist), into the scenario. Danny's interviews with Kathy, a motorcycle club moll (Killing Eve's Jodie Comer with teased hair, cat-eye liner, and a zesty regional accent), form the film's narrative. Nichols presents everything from her point of view. And everything involves men. Chicago citizens are likely to have thoughts about Comer's accent, especially since she hits it harder than everyone else, but I found it funny--in a good way.
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| Kathy, Chicago, 1966 / Danny Lyon |
Kathy, a Chicago native, doesn't initially have any interest in motorcycle culture until a friend invites her to a biker bar.
The leather-clad men ogle her and make crude comments, and she can't wait to leave until she spots Benny (Austin Butler, fresh from his turn as an eerie bald baddie in Dune 2), presiding over a pool table, and it's love and/or lust at first sight. As attractive as Comer may be, Nichols reserves his most glamorous shots for Butler, who plays the misunderstood brooder to perfection. If anything, Butler looks more like a matinee idol in The Bikeriders than the much-touted Glen Powell in Hit Man, though it's a bit of a mixed blessing, since there isn't much to Benny, at least in comparison with Kathy or Johnny (Tom Hardy, back on a bike after his turn in George Miller's Fury Road), the head of the Vandals Motorcycle Club, a group inspired by Chicago's Outlaw MC.
Granted, it's possible that this was intentional, since these are real meat and potatoes guys. They drink, they smoke, they fight, and they ride their bikes--without helmets. That's about it. Women hover along the periphery, but other than Kathy, Nichols never introduces any of them. Considering that he has Gail (Phuong Kubacki), silent squeeze of the avuncular Brucie (Australian actor Damon Herriman, Justified's loveable loser Dewey Crowe), beside him at all times, it would have been nice to learn something about her, not least because she's a woman of Asian descent, and the club, as was surely the case in the 1960s--even in multiracial Chicago--was very white.
Handing the narration to a woman cuts through the macho bluster, but that doesn't make it feminist. Kathy has a backbone, and she doesn't hesitate to speak her mind, but she's cut from the same cloth as Cathy Moriarty's underage Vickie, the future Mrs. Jake LaMotta, in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, i.e. her life revolves around her man.
Fortunately, she's a fully-grown adult, and Benny isn't an abuser or even a cheater. He just can't stop getting into fights with other men, though, and she's helpless to stop him.
In the prologue, Benny gets into a brutal scrape with two bulky barflies--in a joint managed by Old Joy actor/musician Will Oldham--who take offense to his "colors" or bike club gear. They rough him up so badly, in fact, that for the first time in his life he's forced to consider whether it might be time to do something other than ride and fight, ride and fight until he ends up in a gutter somewhere. Since Nichols never shows him working, it isn't clear if he sponges off Kathy, or if he works in a garage like Boyd Holbrook's Cal, though I was never certain where her income came from either.
Nor is it clear what fuels Benny's anger, and it doesn't really matter. Johnny, on the other hand, takes inspiration from Brando's Johnny Strabler, head of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, in the iconic 1953 picture The Wild One.
When someone asks what he's rebelling against, Brando famously replies, "Whaddaya got?" The entire club adheres to the same philosophy. They're raging against straight society, which has its faults, but what they have to offer isn't much better, and as time goes on, it will become worse.
It's fun at first as all of these miscreants come together as one. Michael Shannon, who has appeared in five Nichols films to date, plays the unhinged Zipco, who dismisses anyone with intellectual aspirations as a "pinko." He doesn't seem to have any idea what the word means, since he even applies it to his brother in the military, the difference being that his brother passed his medical, whereas Zipco was rejected due to mental instability.
To Zipco, that makes his brother a commie, even though he's probably the exact opposite.
Only the bug-eating Cockroach (Emory Cohen, Saoirse Ronan's American beau in Brooklyn), a married man with child, has aspirations--to become a motorcycle cop. Considering that the cops and the bikers are sworn enemies, his ambition splits the difference between inevitable and insane.
As the 1960s bleed into the 1970s, other Vandals chapters spring up throughout the Midwest. Their hair gets longer, the music gets louder, the mood-enhancing substances get stronger--and more lethal--and the violence becomes downright psychopathic. It's the beginning of the end, not least when the "live fast, die young" club members start to drop off one by one.
Nichols has assembled a terrific ensemble of supporting players, from Karl Glusman to Norman Reedus, and it was fun to try to figure out where I had seen all of them before. Everyone gets into the spirit of the thing, and if the director doesn't exactly glamorize their exploits, especially as things turn rotten, I wish he had offered a stronger critique.
The club's whiteness, for instance, is a given, but it isn't something he ever addresses, which comes as a disappointment after Loving, which offered his first leading character of color, Mildred Loving, a performance for which Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga scored her first Oscar nomination.
On the one hand, there's a meeting of the tribes in which Black bikers join the throng, but they and the Vandals never mingle. Simply put, most biker clubs were segregated in the 1960s and beyond.
More egregiously, though, Nichols ignores the fact that the club, according to Danny Lyon, included white supremacist members, though I couldn't say how many. Lyon, a civil rights activist who became a legit biker while working on The Bikeriders, distanced himself from the group when the Nazi element came in to play.
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| Danny Lyon in motorcycle mode |
Then there's the handling of misogyny and sexuality in the film. When the bikers ogle Kathy at the bar, and she complains about it to Johnny, he explains that they just want to date her. But that doesn't justify the grimy-handed groping. Johnny's unspoken boys-will-be-boys implication is that the club members don't want to rape her, though she feels otherwise until she meets Benny, with whom she instantly feels protected. Later, after the club has grown wilder and woolier, a group of men--none of whom were part of the original group--will attempt to have their way with her at a house party. It's a harrowing sequence, but it's also an isolated one. In real life, it seems likely that there more than a few victims of sexual assault at the hands of the Outlaws.
And though Comer and Butler have chemistry, it's pretty restrained. If anything, they recall the unworldly, rural couple in Loving, but what made sense in a story about devotion in the face of discrimination makes less here. When Kathy sees Benny for the first time, she's struck more by lust than love, except the actors don't generate much heat. Nichols doesn't give them a chance--it isn't part of his filmmaking toolkit--and it's too bad, not least since the only sexual activity he does depict is of the most terrible kind (ironically or otherwise, the attempted assault recalls Ridley Scott's The Last Duel in which the rape of Comer's character sets off the entire plot).
For all its faults, though, I enjoyed The Bikeriders. A rousing soundtrack, including selections from Chicago blues legend Magic Sam and the fabulous hair-hoppers of the Shangri-Las, doesn't hurt, but more importantly, Nichols finds a touching way to bring things to a close, a real achievement, because as entertaining as these bikers may be--a few are even quite funny--they're about as far from sensitive as human beings can get. The ending also gives Kathy the chance to make the move from bystander and narrator to something more: a woman who gets exactly what she wants.
The Bikeriders opens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Thurs, July 20. Images from the IMDb (Austin Butler and Jodie Comer), art2art Circulating Exhibitions (the original Kathy), Uproxx (Tom Hardy channeling Marlon Brando by way of Belmondo), American Cinematheque (Brando in The Wild One), Just Jared (Michael Shannon), and Chicago Maroon (Danny Lyon).
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