Focus Features
Editor’s Note: This review was originally published on September 1, 2023 after the film’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The film was originally scheduled to be released in December 2023 by 20th Century Studios before being derailed by Hollywood strikes. Focus Features is distributing it now and releases it in theaters Friday.
Biker films are almost a subgenre of films in their own right, starting with that of Marlon Brando. The wild in the early 50s and then through all those 60s AIP exploitation titles including The Wild Angels, the Hells Angels on wheels and many others, including Tom Laughlin’s predecessor Billy Jack called Born losers. It all culminated with EasyRider with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, who would become the Citizen Kane biker cinema.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a major big screen return to the world of biker culture, but with Jeff Nichols’ film. Bikeriders, which had its world premiere Thursday at the Telluride Film Festival, that long-lost era is back. But its filmmaker has distinctly different ideas and motivations for bringing it back to life. At its core, Nichols tells a period story set in the ’60s and ’70s world of previous efforts, but applies contemporary themes of identity and loyalty and the need to belong in a world increasingly isolating us more as individuals. In addition to that, The bikerThis is more in line with the films that Martin Scorsese has made like The good guys And Mean streets, films that thrill with vivid characters, music and graphic violence. You could also say that this also fits a classic western, with the outlaws riding bicycles instead of horses to get to the inevitable confrontations.
Nichols was inspired by a book of photographs by Danny Lyon. First published in 1967, it chronicles the real life of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club over a four-year period. Nichols created a fictionalized version called The Vandals, but many of the characters are based on photos from these pages of Lyon’s book, which has been reissued several times over the decades.
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The film’s anchor is its storyteller, narrator Kathy (Jodie Comer), who describes her relationship with Benny (Austin Butler), a hard-wired enigma estranged from her family who is often the first to fight and who has no not afraid to choose sides. They marry five weeks after meeting, but he is elusive and moody, and she finds herself constantly fighting for his attention due to his father/son-type relationship with her mentor, Johnny (Tom Hardy), the aging biker who leads the Vandals, where Benny has found a new home, so to speak. He has a penchant for fighting to the end, just like Johnny, who sees Benny as a potential heir, who does not want to become the leader of the pack.
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Kathy strings together anecdotes about the club’s rise and fall as she tells her story to Danny (Mike Faist), who is recording conversations for a potential book. This is what Lyon actually did, and Nichols uses the device to cover several years of the Vandals’ lives, from the mid-’60s to the ’70s, in a coda recounting what ultimately happened to all the riders. There are a number of other colorful characters, including the eccentric Zipco (Nichols regular Michael Shannon); Cal (Boyd Holbrook), who is the head mechanic and more interested in bikes than people; Brucie (Damon Herriman); Wahoo (Beau Knapp); the freewheeling cockroach (Emory Cohen); Funny Sonny (The Walking Dead Norman Reedus); and Corky (Karl Glusman). Each of them has a distinct personality that blends well to make this fictional gang memorable, but it’s Butler and Hardy who get the lion’s share of our attention, and both actors are sensational here.
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Coming off his Oscar nomination Elvis, Butler fits comfortably into a James Dean-style rebel whose cause seems to survive one violent encounter after another. Hardy is the grizzled veteran, the older guy who was inspired to create the Vandals after seeing Brando do it in A savage but who clearly feels that his era could soon belong to the past, because a new generation with different sensibilities is knocking at this door. The leader of this generation is The Kid (British actor Toby Wallace), an arrogant teenager with his own gang who is looking to join the Vandals, but Johnny rightly senses trouble. One of the best scenes in the film shows Johnny confronting The Kid, who is essentially trying to prove that he and his buddies have the right things to sign up for.
While there are many vivid and graphically gory scenes along the way, it is ultimately a portrait of changing times, our collective need for connection, and the complications that arise from them. It’s the code of the Wild West meets the new: masculinity unraveled, some who make it and some who don’t. Nichols has dealt with the complexities of what motivates men in varied and brilliant films, including Mud And Magnet, among others, and here presents an image, yes, violent, but strangely poignant, which fits perfectly with what motivates him as a sharp chronicler of who we were and what we are becoming.
Comer is sensational with a key female voice in a picture otherwise dominated by guys. Props to veteran casting director Francine Maisler, who helped Nichols bring the faces he saw in Lyon’s book to such stunning cinematic life. This ensemble cast is superb in every way. There are also some nice brief tips of the hat for The wild And EasyRider themselves.
The producers are Sarah Green, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Arnon Milchan.
Title: Bikers
Distributer: Focus Features
Release date: June 21, 2024
Director-screenwriter: Jeff Nichols
Cast: Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, Boyd Holbrook, Damon Herriman, Beau Knapp, Emory Cohen, Toby Wallace, Norman Reedus, Karl Glusman
Rating: A.
Operating time: 1h 56m