They were the the original one percent – not the richest of the richest, the elite within the elite, but “the 1 percent who don’t fit in and don’t care… We’ve managed to find our way out of ‘a hundred growls, we stayed alive thanks to our boots and our fists. These first-hand quotes open up Hunter S. Thompson’s thinking Angels of Hell, the definitive account of the biker gang that was both the emblem of pure, untouched post-war freedom and a nightmare for “respectable” society. They’re coming to your town, they’re going to party, they’re a bunch of greasy, dirty, beer-drinking American gearheads who don’t give a damn. They were misfits who found liberation on two wheels and lived by their own violent, autonomous codes. The book begins with recognizing the Gonzo King as a kindred spirit. This ends with them being trampled en masse.
The Angels were not the only motorcycle club in the United States, but simply the best known; there were many others. Like, for example, the Outlaws, whose main section operated in Chicago and allowed photographer Danny Lyons to interview and photograph them while they hung out, worked on their helicopters, and went on long runs. He also recorded interviews with a number of members, as well as some of their wives and girlfriends. The final result, Bikeriders, is a minor classic of modern photo-anthropology – a late ’60s document of both a specific subculture and a moment in which the nation’s Id spat out an oil-splattered alternative version of the DIY American dream. It’s no wonder that filmmaker Jeff Nichols was hooked when he came across the book in his youth. It’s a transmission from a lost Greaser Nirvana.
What is intelligent about the writer-director’s attempt to transform Bikers in a full-fledged biker film is that he’s fully aware that he’s adapting a bound portfolio for the screen. Lyons himself is a character, played by The challengers Mike Faist as an impartial photographer, part therapist with a microphone, and part scruffy historian. There’s a story of sorts here, a sort of love triangle between Benny (Austin Butler), the gang’s lost heartthrob; Kathy (Jodie Comer), his long-suffering wife and de facto narrator; and the club itself, renamed The Vandals and embodied by its stoic founder, Johnny (Tom Hardy, at his peak Tom Hardiest). You get a lot of conflict, but few concrete resolutions. And like all empires, this gang will experience a rise, a peak, a crossing of the Rubicon and a fall.
Yet Nichols’ take on the material is actually about presenting things less as a traditional narrative and more as a series of vignettes, all of which amount to artfully aged, grime-dusted visuals and experiential ambiance. This is a book of moving pictures, from foggy bars to brawls on muddy tracks to working-class homes and haunts, and with an eye toward the cumulative effect of so much vintage cool exposed. Remember that chestnut about a 50s retro diner that’s a thrilling wax museum? This is a gallery display featuring a Harley Panhead engine, restored and customized for maximum nostalgia. vroom.
Iconography has always been a key element of biker gangs, biker culture and biker films: the symbols that shock squares (swastikas, iron crosses), identification badges, leather jackets and cuffed jeans. Lyon’s photo book chronicles the uniform which was or less implemented in the years 1953. The wild, a film that is referenced both literally – legend has it that Johnny was inspired to start the Vandals after seeing the film on television – and metaphorically here, via Hardy’s extremely Brando-channeling performance, Cro- Mag-with-a-heart-of-chrome. . The photographer/author also gave readers an inside look at a mostly white, mostly blue-collar world, with all its frayed edges, and it’s the aspects of class and outcast that Nichols dwells on the most. Go back to the golden age of biker movies, i.e. 1967-69, and for every display of dangerously unhinged Dennis Hopper, you’ll find a lot more Hollywood hippies in Hell’s Angel cosplay. Bikers The ensemble cast allows Butler to handle pretty-boy duties solo. Every other member of the Vandals looks like a factory worker or a real wild fringe dweller on a bender, all the better to immerse you in this Kodachrome time capsule. You can practically smell the cheap wine and axle grease on it.
Jodie Comer and Austin Butler in ‘The Bikeriders’.
Kyle Kaplan/Focus Features
Lyons’ book also used a long recorded conversation with Kathy Bauer, Benny’s real-life wife, as a message from this dirty-nail underworld. Much of this is reused almost verbatim as voiceover read by Comer, in what may be the most impressive feat of regional mimicry in ages. The Liverpudlian Kill Eve the star has already gifted the world with a multitude of impressive sonic acrobatics; her exaggerated version of Bauer’s Midwestern accent is so perfectly convincing because she’s so authentically cartoonish, setting the tone for the rest of his Comer-chameleon performance. Yet that accomplishment pales in comparison to what she’s doing in terms of Kathy’s state of mind. Her patience, determination, and perseverance are tested with every game of tug of war she loses for Benny’s soul. When a particularly dangerous encounter breaks her, Comer gives you a glimpse of every crack and fracture, as each one finally meets like a web in the middle. She is the heart of the film, first by default, then by design.
As for Butler and Hardy, the former is beauty – when the Elvis The actor goes around James Dean by moving his head, waiting for a beat then letting his eyes follow, it’s like watching old-school movie stardom in hyperdrive – and the latter is brains and brawn . These two actors clearly worship at the altar of vulnerability in 20th century methods, which syncs well with the period feel of this look at male anger; the double of strength and sensitivity which allowed Brando et al. Redefining American masculinity for a generation of performers here is as much a part of their uniform as leather and denim. Hardy, in particular, makes the most of his strong, silent archetype by adding not only latent menace, but also subliminal undercurrents of existential despair and hopeless weariness. It’s a potent blend of sub-zero cool and extreme heat that it brings to this party. Challenged on his leadership, he casually asks if his opponent prefers fists or knives. Begging Butler’s Benny to take over the gang at a late-night bonfire, Hardy’s character moves so close to his protégé’s personal space that one wonders if someone slipped in subversively a reel of Scorpio Ascendant in the projection.
Bikers does not necessarily come to praise these road warriors, nor want to entirely bury their memory. Nichols said he was trying to capture the bygone sense of rebellion and radical disruption that these gangs represented, as well as the vintage, hip vibe he felt when he flipped through Lyons’ book. Thanks to its holy trinity of tracks – not to mention a gallery of clutch thieves that includes Michael Shannon’s brutal loose cannon, Damon Herriman’s right-hand man and Beau Knapp and Karl Glusman’s double act Mutt & Jeff – you come away feeling like he hit the grasexycool bullseye. The filmmaker also knows that, to quote a wise man, to live outside the law you have to be honest, and once a younger generation begins to make their way to freedom from the Vandals – just another word for nothing left – To lose the party, you can see the necessary notion of honor among the thieves as they slowly ride off into the sunset. These original photos captured an ephemeral bird returned to the world in amber. The film knows that the nihilistic gesture can now seem slightly stilted. But he still wants to pay homage to the memory of the gloriously tense majors of yesteryear.