I Just Want To Ride On My Motorcycle

Director Jeff Nichols adapted his movie ‘The Bikeriders’ from an obscure late 1960s book of photojournalism and interviews, and ‘The Bikeriders’ plays like a museum piece, an absorbing old Chicago Reader or Village Voice article found in the back stacks of a library. The movie concerns a working-class biker club, the “Vandals”, in the more or less Nelson Algren parts of Chicago in the mid-60s and early 70s. The story is shaggy and haphazard: A trucker named Johnny starts the club after seeing Marlon Brando in ‘The Wild One’ on TV, there’s lots of brawling and dirt-bike racing, some people come back from Vietnam and start doing drugs and violence and ruin the club, and that’s about it.

THE BIKERIDERS ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Jeff Nichols
Written by: Jeff Nichols
Starring: Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus
Running time: 116 mins

There are three main characters in The Bikeriders: Johnny, who Tom Hardy plays as a somewhat thick, gravelly enigma, Benny, played by Austin Butler in a goatee and Danny Zuko hair, and the movie’s actual heart, Kathy, Benny’s wife. The British actor Jodie Comer gives a remarkable, soulful performance as Kathy, a regular working-class Chicago gal who bears witness to the rise and fall of the Vandals, showing very little emotion throughout it all, save one scene where a bunch of freaks nearly rape and kill her at a party. Except for in an early scene, we never see Kathy on a motorcycle. We mostly see her smoking and narrating the film in her kitchen, as a journalist played by Mike Faist interviews her.

Nichols uses the interviews as a framing device, which is actually the central problem with The Bikeriders. Faist is clearly a stand-in for Danny Lyon, who wrote the book. Mostly, he interviews Kathy. Occasionally, he interviews some of the movie’s entertaining side characters, including the weird, grimy, and excellent Michael Shannon. But he never spends any time with Hardy or Butler, the dramatic centers of the movie. Nichols has said he drew 70 percent of the dialogue and most of the imagery in The Bikeriders from Lyon’s book. So in the scenes without Kathy–which are frequent enough–who’s narrating them? Why are we seeing this? How do we know?

Hardy’s character has a satisfying if tragic arc. But Butler’s Benny is an enigma throughout the movie. Where did he come from? Why does he do what he does? How can he be so handsome in a world absolutely stuffed with filthy dirtbags? On the one hand, Nichols does us a service. Because he takes the dialogue from the source materials, it sounds like real people are talking. There are basically no clichés, and this is about as true-to-life as a movie like this can look and feel. Despite the frequent outbursts of violence, The Bikeriders lacks melodramatic flourish, which works in its favor. On the other hand, Butler, the movie’s protagonist, has basically no character. He’s basically a chain-smoking greaser studmuffin. While that may sound appealing on the surface, it’s also kind of a dull study in coolness.

And despite Comer’s expressive eyes, in which I got lost several times during the movie without even thinking about asking for directions, her Karen also is kind of a mystery. What does she do when The Bikeriders are roaring down the roads of Kankakee or wherever? Does she have a job  or a family? Does she do anything but wait in her run-down rowhouse for either Benny or an equally sexy journalist to show up? She’s not manic, she’s not a pixie, but she’s definitely a biker’s dream girl.

But maybe that’s not the point of The Bikeriders. It feels more like a documentary than a scripted film, and documentaries rarely have a narratively satisfying end. Though somewhat dramatically inert, and surprisingly lacking in scenes of people riding motorcycles, it has a feel for its time and place that lands it far above most period pieces. And that’s why we call it The Leader of the Pack.