Assuming that much of the hooning around on motorbikes in The Bikeriders was done by stunt doubles, Austin Butler’s major contribution to this film is to look pretty and stare blankly at everyone else, and the camera. In his role as the young hoodlum, Bennie, the new Hollywood heartthrob has relatively few lines, even though he is the fulcrum around which the story revolves. His good looks can’t disguise the fact that Bennie is a young man of severely limited intelligence, a retarded emotional life, a penchant for violence, and a wilfulness bordering on insanity.
Nevertheless, for Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer), Bennie is her fatal attraction. She knows it’s not rational, she’s not even sure it’s love, but from the minute she lays eyes on him at a crowded biker party, she’s smitten. Bennie, in his strange, silent way, reciprocates those feelings. He parks his bike across the road from her house and stages a vigil until her live-in boyfriend freaks out and leaves.
When we enter this tale Bennie is being heavied in a bar by two ugly brothers who object to him wearing the colours of his motorcycle gang, the Vandals. From a painful freeze frame we cut to Kathy, who is telling the story to Danny (Mike Faist), a photographer recording interviews with gang members in preparation for a book. This sets the pattern for Jeff Nichols’s film, which flips back and forth between past and present, as interviews drift seamlessly into flashbacks. It remains a drama, but the documentary aspect is never far away.
The Bikeriders is based on Danny Lyon’s book of the same name, originally published in 1968. It was the fruit of four years spent with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club of Chicago. In the spirit of the New Journalism, Lyon joined the gang and rode with them, intending that his eventual publication would “record and glorify the life of the American bikerider.” After spending a year as a fully-fledged member, he found plenty that resisted any attempt at glorification.
Nichols’s film proceeds along the same lines, although his version of Danny is always tangential to the group, while the relationships between characters have been transformed into a bikie soap opera. What begins as an expression of rebellion against the conformity of mainstream American society, with Cream’s I Feel Free playing as the guys zoom along on their bikes, will gradually degenerate into sordid criminality. As the scene gets heavier, so does the music, with Iggy and the Stooges on the playlist.
Nichols is well aware the biker film is a cinematic genre in its own right, albeit mostly in the exploitation category. The legendary example remains The Wild One (1953), in which Marlon Brando played the terminally cool Johnny Strabler. We learn that one of Nichols’s main characters, Tom Hardy’s Johnny, was inspired to start his own motorcycle club after watching Brando’s performance. As a reminder, Nichols flashes up the best line in The Wild One, when a girl asks: “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” and Brando replies: “Whaddya got?”
Aside from Benny and Kathy, Johnny is the dominant personality in The Bikeriders. Older than the other group members, he has a wife and kids, a suburban home, and a regular job as a truck driver. None of this seems as important to him as the gang, over which he presides as supreme leader, ready to suppress any challenge to his authority. Not only is Johnny a whole lot smarter than anybody else, his aura of tough guy infallibility instills a sense of awe in his underlings. They include Damon Herriman’s Brucey, Johnny’s right-hand man and chief organiser; Zipco, a Latvian brute, played by Michael Shannon, who was judged too “undesirable” to send to Vietnam; Cockroach (Emory Cohen), named for his fondness for eating bugs, and Kel (Boyd Holbrook), who knows all about bikes.
Yet it’s Benny for whom Johnny reserves a special affection. Kathy says this is because he admires the younger man’s inability to feel anything, physically and emotionally. Johnny sees Benny as his annointed successor, but Benny, who treats Johnny as a father figure, has no desire to be a leader. He is the most pure spirit of all the Vandals, apparently wanting no more from life than the freedom to ride his motorbike. It’s not clear how Benny earns a living, and bikeriding is not exactly a long term career plan. Kathy tries to prise him out of this lifestyle, which is tantamount to a death wish. She recognises that Johnny is her chief rival for Benny’s loyalty, and fears she is on the losing side.
The gang, conceived and run by Johnny, is an ultra-masculine affair, but it relies heavily on the power of the tribe. Other than Benny, when the bikers are alone they don’t wear the colours. Their power and prestige is due to the fear inspired by the group, but by themselves they are scared and vulnerable. There’s a palpable code of honour among club members, enforced by Johnny’s benign dictatorship, but this starts to break down when the bikers become a mass movement, with chapters spread across the USA. New members have come straight from Vietnam, psychologically scarred and brutalised. There’s also a growing culture of youth violence, epitomised by Toby Wallace, who plays a nameless, baby-faced psychopath, a wannabee gangster in bikers’ colours.
Part western, part Greek tragedy, part documentary, The Bikeriders is a patchwork film about an unusual ménage à trois in which the two most articulate characters, Kathy and Johnny, compete for the affections of the enigmatic Benny. The rest of the gang are no more than the chorus that focuses attention on the three leads, although it’s hard to keep Michael Shannon from stealing a scene. There’s a feeling of slow-burning tragedy, as Johnny realises that his romantic idea of a bikers’ club is destined to be swallowed up by violent, evil elements, while he goes the way of the dinosaurs. Despite his unflappable persona, he knows he’s started something he can’t control.
Nichols allows us to read this as an incipient social tragedy – a loss of innocence, but the Vandals were never exactly Robin Hood and his merry men. In their clubhouse, they could play at being rebels, but it was really a hideaway from a world that would eventually reassert its claims. When even Benny can’t cling to the dream any more, we know the game is up.
The Bikeriders
Directed by Jeff Nichols
Written by Jeff Nichols after a book by Danny Lyon
Starring: Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Mike Faist, Toby Wallace, Damon Herriman, Michael Shannon, Norman Reedus, Boyd Holbrook, Emory Cohen, Beau Knapp, Karl Glusman, Happy Anderson
USA, M, 116 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 13 June, 2024