54493: The Bikeriders

Back in 2004, I was faced with two prospects: work in the oil and gas industry or go back to grad school. Given that this blog isn’t about my ostentatious wealth, you can probably guess which path I took. On the strength of three year-old GRE scores and meager charm, I secured a spot in a mass communications MA program and spent two years studying at the University of Oklahoma. In my own nerdy way, I was running away from growing up and becoming a productive member of society. I had an assistantship that paid enough for me to live on, I loved the school and the people I worked with. I loved being part of an in-group, even if it ultimately left me at a disadvantage for dealing with the realities of life outside my bubble.

I’d like to say that’s why biker films resonate with me, that the insider-outsider dynamic is why I felt so drawn to them that I eventually wrote my MA thesis on the genre (I’ll send you the pdf if you want) but the truth is that I’d never seen a single biker movie before I started my thesis research. I’ve seen a bunch of them now, and The Bikeriders isn’t like any of them.

Let’s get this out of the way now: The Bikeriders is about the love triangles that crop up between women, men, and motorcycles. It’s a romance, a tragedy, a character study, an exploration of gender, a critique of society. It’s a good movie built on strong performances, agile editing, gorgeous photography, and Tom Hardy’s 90-minute tribute to a young Marlon Brando. But it isn’t a biker movie.

A biker movie is not generally a reflection of the lived experiences of actual people who ride motorcycles, either solo or in biker gangs. Normally, a biker movie is a modern fantasy, tenuously connected to reality. It’s melodrama cranked out for teen audiences looking to try on rebellion, like a well worn leather jacket, to see how it hangs off their shoulders. If done well, it’s exploitative, cheap, loud, vulgar, and thrilling. Usually. That isn’t The Bikeriders.

Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, The Bikeriders tells the story of Chicago’s Vandals motorcycle gang through the 1960s and 1970s. The script is based on a book of photographs and interviews with the gang conducted by University of Chicago student Danny Lyon, and as such it is connected to reality in a way that Easy Rider, Billy Jack, or Werewolves on Wheels would never want to be.

The Bikeriders is a thoroughly grounded story of blue collar misfits in Chicago, explored through extended, non-linear flashbacks, courtesy of Lyon’s interviews with Jodie Comer’s Kathy Bauer/Cross, the eventual wife of handsome biker Benny Cross, played handsomely by Austin Butler. Placing the focus on Kathy’s recollections not only gives us the chance to enjoy Comer’s ridiculously over-the-top-but-also-one-hundred-percent-accurate Chicago accent, it turns The Bikeriders into an exploration of the female gaze.

We see this hyper-masculine world through Kathy’s eyes, which makes The Bikeriders and its subjects feel fresh. It also keeps the movie from descending into the realm of homage or pastiche. The Bikeriders is different enough to bring something new to a genre that was, essentially, played out by the time Easy Rider left theaters in 1969. Comer, ridiculous accent and all, takes us into this world and shows it to us in a new way. It’s not as visceral as Satan’s Sadists, though it does have its bloody moments. Like the source material, it’s more objective than I was expecting, but Comer’s amour fou keeps the stakes high throughout the story.

The subject of all that amour, Benny, is a worthy object of desire. It turns out that if you let Austin Butler grow out his eyebrows and shoot him in full color, he’s a decent looking guy. Decent enough to catch Kathy’s eye immediately, and with her eye the camera’s. From the moment Kathy lays eyes on him, Benny is costumed, lit, and framed so as to make him pop out from the background and from the crowd. Nichols moves them together with great rapidity, seemingly less interested in how they get together than he is in how they stay together.

Naturally, there’s another leg in this love triangle, and his name is Johnny Davis, played Brandovingly by Tom Hardy. Johnny, much like Brando’s Johnny Strabler from The Wild One, is the misunderstood, sensitive rebel at the heart of the gang. Unlike Strabler, and virtually every gang leader in the genre, Johnny Davis is a comfortable, middle class family man with a wife, children, job as a truck driver, and house. He is living the blue collar American Dream back when that was still a thing people did. Nothing about him says, “future gang leader,” until, according to Kathy, he happened to catch The Wild One on television.

Nichols shows us Johnny, in his nicely furnished living room, watching raptly as Brando, in all his leather-clad glory, offers to rebel against whatever society has to offer. The look on Johnny’s face is that of a person who has touched the hem of Jesus’ robe or scored a selfie with Bill Murray. His life is changed in that moment, and he resolves to transition his participation in motocross racing into running a biker gang. Classic mid-life crisis. Naturally, it all goes to hell in a way that would feel at home in the end of Act II of a Scorsese movie, and Johnny turns to Benny as his heir apparent, looking to hand him the club so he can retire and fade away. All the while, Hardy does his best version of Brando, which it turns out is just Bane without the mask.

I’m kidding. Hardy does a great job as Johnny. But, yeesh, he really Brandos it up out there.

So now we’ve got the triangle: Kathy loves Benny and wants to be his heteronormative partner; Johnny loves Benny and wants to give him the keys to Johnny’s kingdom; Benny is pulled betwixt them, handsomely, and his emotions, smoldering like the cherry of a lit cigarette in the night, threatening to burn it all down.

Again, I’m kidding. It’s not that melodramatic.

But it is interesting to watch the push and pull between the three of them, with the club looming ever present over them. The club is their life. It changes how they see the world, how the world sees them, who they spend time with and what they do with that time. “I used to be respectable,” Kathy says at one point. She traded respectability for love, and the movie asks us to decide if it was worth it. Kathy would tell us it is, but what about Benny? What does he trade away, and is it worth it for him?

You probably don’t need me to tell you that a movie about a bunch of violent man-boys in the 1960s, told through the eyes of a woman, makes some critiques about toxic masculinity and the patriarchy. But it does, and does it pretty well. Even more fundamental, however, are the questions it raises about belonging, and who we choose to belong to.

I’m not entirely sure why this movie was made now, nor who exactly it was made for, but I’m glad it was. It’s a fun ride that will linger in your mind long after the echoes of the roaring engines have faded away.