Since Shotgun Stories, his 2007 debut, there hasn’t been a bad Jeff Nichols film. But The Bikeriders comes close, a downbeat affair quietly putting the glamorous image of the motorbike gang to the test, if not to the sword.
The film is based on a 1960s photo-book by Danny Lyon, which followed the Outlaws (here renamed the Vandals) motorbike club for several years, photographing the guys and girls and talking to them about their lives.
Constructed as a series of flashbacks, it is strung together by interviews Lyon (played here by Mike Faist, of Challengers fame) conducts over the years with a young woman called Kathy (Jodie Comer), who fell badly for a bad boy, joined the bike gang he belonged to and then watched it bloom and wilt as her relationship did something similar.
But. Gangs! Bikes! Girls! Sex! Er… not really. Putting an ambivalent spin on what in other hands would be tasty if familiar ingredients, Nichols stages much of his film around tables in the bar where the guys chug beer, or at campfires where the guys also chug beer, or at parties where the guys again chug beer. For a biker film there’s not that much interest in bikes. In one key scene Nichols pointedly shows us that the guys are all in cars. A totemic Michael Shannon (sixth time out with Nichols), meanwhile, as the dullest, stupidest member of the gang, kind of tells it like it is.
Good cast – I mean Norman Reedus and Boyd Holbrook in mostly nothing roles is a sign of how much capital Nichols has these days. After the likes of Midnight Special, Mud, and Take Shelter – all also “point of view” movies – that’s hardly surprising.
Austin Butler plays ultimate take-me-to-hell-and-I-don’t-care bad boy Benny, angular cheekbones and artful facial hair complementing a performance scouring the mean, moody and magnificent style guide for new elements. He finds a few, not all of them sulks.
Tom Hardy goes for Marlon Brando (explicitly referenced) by way of Joe Pesci and is bluff and swarfy as the boss of the bike gang with a standing invitation to anyone who wants to take the leadership from him – fight me for it. Someone eventually does.
As for Comer, the accents – for which she is justly famous – are beginning to get in the way of the acting. Here, though, she plays Kathy as necessarily defocused, a voice in search of a character.
Lyon’s book is a series of captioned snapshots, essentially, and early on while Nichols is in snapshot mode his film has a jerky dynamic. We meet, for instance, Sonny Barger (Reedus), who founded the Hell’s Angels in California and whose presence reminds us that back in the day bike gangs had a flinty respect for each other and weren’t always trying to beat each other to death with chains. These rebels without a cause did all know, to paraphrase the famous Brando quote, what they were rebelling against. As the bike club becomes a bike gang becomes a gangster business that’s clearly no longer the case.
Nichols goes for Robert Altman in his free-flowing, episodic style and his not-much-happens approach to storytelling. Not much happening being the subversive point of the film. Bikers once looked like glamorous outlaws. But running red lights on your Harley and doing 50mph over the speed limit where schoolkids are trying to cross the road – that’s the way assholes behave, isn’t it?
“When I die, I wanna die on my bike,” says gang member Wahoo (Beau Knapp) at one point, neatly encapsulating the death-or-glory code these young men claim to live by. And on the sidelines, represented by Kathy, a different point of view. She never says they’re just boys refusing to grow up and nor, quite, does Nichols. He wants to have it both ways. If a takedown is what he’s after it’s a murky one, and you don’t so much need to read between the lines as crack out the investigative magnifying glass.
The Bikeriders – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024