At The Movies: A love story on two wheels coasts at half-speed in The Bikeriders
The Bikeriders (M18)
116 minutes, now showing
2 stars
The story: It is the 1960s in the American Midwest. Kathy (Jodie Comer) is at a rough bar at the invitation of a friend. Despite her apprehension, she meets and falls for the charismatic Benny (Austin Butler), a member of the Vandals motorcycle club and close friend of club founder and leader Johnny (Tom Hardy). The story tracks Kathy, Benny and the club as it grows and changes with the times. The film is a fictional adaption of American photojournalist and film-maker Danny Lyon’s 1968 photo book of the same name, created after he spent four years as a member of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club.
At several points during the screening, the sentence “What would Martin Scorsese have done with this story?” crossed this reviewer’s mind.
The Bikeriders has the makings of a project the acclaimed Hollywood director of crime sagas Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023), The Irishman (2019) and Goodfellas (1990) would love – a period setting, morally compromised main characters and a uniquely American historical context.
In this film, the context is the outlaw motorcycle club, organisations birthed in the 1950s and 1960s which, by the 1970s, had hardened into criminal enterprises. From cool non-conformists to violent drug dealers – through the fictional Vandals club – the rise and fall of an American institution is charted.
American writer-director Jeff Nichols has a filmography that follows a path similar to Scorsese’s. In critically acclaimed works, such as the psychological thriller Take Shelter (2011) and coming-of-age drama Mud (2012), misfits with outsized dreams come under scrutiny.
In The Bikeriders, Benny and Johnny are as drawn to the rebel image as they are to riding itself. Nichols’ screenplay hints at masculine mimicry – Johnny is using an idea of manhood borrowed from the globally influential drama The Wild One (1953). It starred Marlon Brando, oozing sex appeal in a movie that would launch dozens of bike clubs around the world. Like so many themes in this story, the idea of real life copying fiction is touched on, but never explored in a meaningful way.
Austin’s impulsive, suicidally wilful Benny possesses the most authentic manifestation of the rebel ethos, a trait that attracts less fulfilled persons like Johnny and Kathy. He is the real thing that makes pretenders out of everyone else.
Nichols has chosen to put the Kathy-Benny coupling at the centre. Not surprisingly, bliss is not on the cards when one-half of a couple believes that domesticity is death.
Viewers will find the happenings on the margins – the power struggles, the club rituals, the members’ attitudes towards society in general and to women in particular – more interesting than the central relationship. The paradox of organised non-conformism deserves a deeper dive.
It does not help that British actor Hardy, in trying to sound Midwestern, adopts a distractingly incoherent accent, but the saving grace is that his mumbling masks it most of the time.
Hot take: This take on the history of the outlaw motorcycle club has nostalgia and romance, but falls short on drive and details.