‘The Bikeriders’ Review: Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy Stir the Surface of Jeff Nichols’ Gorgeous, Violent Love Letter to Outsiders

Sheri Linden
·6 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Jeff Nichols’ filmography is still young, and still showing no signs of settling in to a stylistic signature — or rut. Through such distinctive features as Take Shelter, Loving, Midnight Special and Mud, the writer-helmer has, though, established a certain directorial integrity. Valuing mood and gesture over plot or formula, his stories are propelled by an openhearted but unsentimental tenderness toward his characters, and invigorated by electrifying grace notes.

With his latest offering, the gloves, at first, seem to be off. The Bikeriders is set within a testosterone-fueled counterculture where brute stupidity frequently prevails, and many viewers will find its violence and code-of-honor brotherhood distancing, or at least familiar movie territory. But what resonates beyond the brawls and blood is a profound affection for the people onscreen — those grace notes provided by a fine cast, with Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy stirring undercurrents that are particularly affecting precisely because they’re never explicitly examined or explained.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Nichols has made an utterly unfashionable romance, one that revolves around working-class white men — a drama that, in its indirect way, challenges assumptions and easy judgment. The Bikeriders is inspired by what Nichols calls “the coolest book I’d ever come across,” Danny Lyon’s 1968 volume of the same name, a collection of photographs and anecdotes chronicling the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Working with cinematographer Adam Stone (returning to the Nichols fold along with editor Julie Monroe, production designer Chad Keith and costume designer Erin Benach), the helmer reproduces the look and feel of those black-and-white photos, albeit it in rich color that’s often bathed in an autumnal glow. They’re images of freedom, and when Nichols’ fictional Chicago Vandals ride — without helmets, naturally — past farm fields or through city streets, they own their destiny. (David Wingo’s score and the song tracks selected by music supervisors Lauren Mikus and Bruce Gilbert are thoroughly in sync with the evocative visuals of Ohio and Kentucky locations.)

The story never quite gathers a conventional sense of urgency; it’s a collective portrait, a memory piece tracing the Vandals’ rise and the ultimate devolution of a club to a gang. The movie’s first scene — and its first shocking jolt of violence — takes place in a daytime bar, establishing the fringe factor of the characters. Sitting alone in his Vandals jacket is Benny, the story’s taciturn object of beauty, played with simmering recalcitrance by Austin Butler (who’ll need to step outside midcentury stories to fully shake off the residue of Elvis swagger).

Nichols shapes the film through the making of Lyon’s book, with Benny’s wife, Kathy (Comer), being interviewed by a stand-in for the real-life photographer. He’s played by West Side Story knockout Mike Faist, a charismatic screen presence who’s somewhat wasted here. His Danny is a sympathetic and curious chronicler, equipped with a boxy reel-to-reel tape recorder, a still camera and an easy smile, but he’s more a device than a character. (Lyon was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which makes for a bit of offscreen common ground with another 1960s-set Telluride premiere, Rustin.)

Much of Kathy’s narration/conversation is taken from Lyon’s interviews for his oral history, and Comer delivers it with an Upper Midwest accent in high gear. That’s a distracting aural reality, but in Comer’s gaze the character’s canny strength, insight and amazement at the life she’s ended up leading, when she “used to be respectable,” lend unexpected shadings to the role. Unlike, say, The Godfather, in this chronicle of a group of men who operate off the mainstream grid, a woman’s voice is front and center.

Kathy’s recollection of her first time at the bar that served as a kind of clubhouse for the Vandals has a comic pull beneath the first-impressions menace. She cautiously makes her way through a rowdy collection of guys with names like Zipco (frequent Nichols muse Michael Shannon in a supporting role), Cockroach (Emory Cohen), Wahoo (Beau Knapp) and Corky (Karl Glusman). That night she takes her first ride on the back of dreamboat Benny’s bike, and as they cross a bridge with the rest of the Vandals behind them in formation, the vision brings to mind Mongolian warriors sweeping across the steppe. Except they’re not waging war or in search of anything in particular.

Unlike most of the club, its founder and president, Johnny (a stellar Hardy), is gainfully employed, a truck driver with a wife and kids. Lightning struck when he saw Marlon Brando rebelling in The Wild One, and, drawn to the rev of engines on dirt roads, he formed a racing club that morphed into something more all-encompassing, a family of outsiders united by the why-the-fuck-not-ness of it all, as well as the allure of valves and carburetors.

If it’s something of a cliché by now that feelings are less easily expressed for men, it was certainly the case for this generation. But beyond that, the Vandals are square pegs who find a place where they can communally not fit in. In their loyalty to one another, they’re also a family of brutes, and a powerful one: In an instance of retaliatory arson, the firefighters stand back and let them watch the inferno they’ve created.

How everyone other than Johnny pays their bills or spends their days is not Nichols’ concern; he’s operating on the level of myth with this collection of types, from the soft-spoken Cal (Boyd Holbrook) and Brucie (Damon Herriman) to the vivid nonconformity with which Shannon, a master of unhinged idiosyncrasy, imbues pinko-hating Zipco. And as Funny Sonny, a California biker who didn’t expect to find kindred souls in Chicagoland, Norman Reedus contributes a spot-on touch of friendly mania.

“Fists or knives?” Johnny asks, after one of his customary long pauses, on the rare occasions when someone throws down the gauntlet to challenge him. When, early in the film, a Vandal played by Happy Anderson, of Maggie Moore(s), does so, their ensuing fight is real and nasty but also played out within certain boundaries. Things are very different by the time a determined Milwaukee kid (Toby Wallace) shows up.

From beginning to end, the visual beauty of the film pays tribute to the source material, and in key moments such as a nighttime conversation between Johnny and Benny about succession, Stone’s mastery lends a cinematic intensity. The DP wraps the men’s faces in ink-dark shadow and gold-tinged light, as Hardy’s deeply internalized performance hits a new register. But it’s a middle-of-the-day face-to-face between Johnny and Kathy that presents the toughest challenge. Referring to the husband who insists he can’t quit the Vandals, her eyes blaze. “He is mine, Johnny,” she says. Whether she believes it is another matter.

In Kathy’s telling, the success of the Vandals is ultimately its undoing, and one of her final experiences at a club party presents a stark contrast to her initial impression of the guys. As the club grows, with chapters across the region, its identity changes. Some of the new members are strung-out casualties of the Vietnam War, and some are just plain mean. Their viciousness makes the founding members’ mano-a-mano violence look quaint and honorable — or simply idealized. This is a love story, after all.

Best of The Hollywood Reporter

Click here to read the full article.