Austin Butler Is Reviving the Cool Guy Movie Star

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WHY DO WE call the big-time actors ‘stars,’ anyway? The thing itself radiates light and heat, a celestial body so powerful that it alters the environment in its direct proximity. Watching Austin Butler, a person can see that stars of the movie variety work in the same way, as if a field around them bends inward to their natural magnetism.

In a recent clip from the Australian premiere event for his new film The Bikeriders, Butler stops to chat with a red carpet correspondent named Lucia, sidling up to her while running a hand through his rain-soaked hair. Within seconds, he’s turned the dynamic around by peppering her with flirty questions about herself, both of them suddenly transported to a very public first date. And that’s exactly how she reacts, her nervous giggles suggesting that—as any of us would—she’s completely forgotten where she is and what’s going on. Everything ceases to exist except for the two of them; a Zoomer would point to this as the dictionary definition of “rizzing her up,” though it’s just as easy to think of it as getting sucked into a charm vortex. (Stars, the ones in the sky, also exert a gravitational pull.)

This same thing happens in The Bikeriders, when narrator Kathy (Jodie Comer) first catches an eyeful of the man who’ll be her husband in five weeks flat. As Benny, a ride-or-die member of the Vandals Motorcycle Club in ‘60s Chicago, Butler looms over a pool table in a sleeveless tee to maximize the definition the overhead lights shade onto his biceps. (You can see his stance for yourself below, and elsewhere on the internet, like leading this article titled “Austin Butler in The Bikeriders is ridiculously pretty and cool.”)

The shot recreates one of the photos from the Danny Lyon book on which the film is based, and yet the moment plays like pure Hollywood, its intensity enhanced by soundtracking and the camera’s slow push in. Beholding this dive-bar adonis, Kathy’s eyes widen and her mouth slightly slackens. He’ll say he’s no good for her in traditional bad-boy fashion, but in that moment, it’s clear she never stood a chance. Resistance is futile; she might as well be staring into the sun.

All of this is to say that Austin Butler exceeds mere handsomeness, his persona more specifically in line with a strain of movie stardom sadly scarce in his generation. Ever since he graduated from bit parts on kiddie shows—please enjoy this interview in which a sixteen-year-old Butler recalls his experience on Zoey 101 and confesses his love for Entourage, one of the key texts on 21st-century male movie stardom—every role has placed him deeper in American myth, the cultural currents that shape not only individual crushes, but entire genres of crush.

Even as a grungy member of the Manson family getting bit in the jewels by Brad Pitt’s attack dog in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he’s first introduced on horseback, the picture of the modern cowboy. In his breakout gig leading 2022’s Elvis, he very credibly portrayed a man whose swiveling hips cleaved the twentieth century in half and invented mainstream fandom as we know it. During his SNL hosting stint, the sketches treated him like a Ken doll capable of pulling off any outfit dealt to him.

But The Bikeriders, a film long-delayed because its distributors knew better than to try and release it without the on-strike Butler available to work the press circuit, crystallizes his essence so aptly as to feel inevitable. The latest and most apropos hunk-archetype added to his repertoire is Marlon Brando, the patron saint of all young actors intent on not letting their good looks make viewers take them less seriously. As the ultimate combination of muscle and sensitivity—so secure in his masculinity that he could halt production during On the Waterfront to attend therapy, or have the occasional no-big-deal bisexual fling with Richard Pryor—he looms large in the imagination of thespians like Butler, who followed Brando’s example by going Method during the Elvis shoot that left him talking in That Voice long after they wrapped. The Bikeriders makes text of this inspiration, as Vandals founder Johnny (Tom Hardy, a fellow Brando-ite) first gets the idea to organize his biker buddies after watching Marlon Brandon in The Wild Ones. “Whaddaya got?” he quietly repeats to his television, fully enraptured. The unstated premise of so many dude-geared dramas is “a bunch of guys pretending to be Marlon Brando,” but in this instance, that is literally the case.

Lyon’s book and the film adapted from it take a credulous view of biker culture as a form of rootin’ tootin’ counterculture, a way for the angry and alienated to find purpose and community. Rejecting the strictures of polite society for a liberation afforded by the free mobility of their hogs, they blaze a path for rebels like hippies, punks, and queer subcultures positioning themselves in opposition to the squares. (Director Jeff Nichols plays the gay angle tastefully, foregrounding the tension with intimate close-ups of Butler and Hardy’s faces millimeters away from touching, while accepting that the norms of the time forbade them from pursuing the love bubbling just beneath the surface.) The plot tracks their moral downfall as the good ol’ days of joyriding and petty larceny gave way to drug dealing and violence against women, and Butler’s Benny stands tall as a stoic embodiment of the principles that wouldn’t survive. In one sense, he fills the same boots as the hard-bitten frontier cowpokes cast aside so civilization could follow.

Initially presented to us with a scene that plays like pornography for anyone into leather jackets, Benny sits on a barstool, nursing a whiskey and cigarette. A couple guys clock his patches and growl at him to remove the offending garment, to which he steadily replies that they’ll have to kill him to get it off. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfect illustration of cool than this, and classically so, his icy demeanor covering the red-hot rage he’ll release a few seconds later once they start scrapping.

Like smoking cigarettes, motorcycling has a hot existential edge to it, motivated by the disaffected willingness to die fast as the cost of truly living. Butler carries that weight with a screen presence that can’t be faked, his air of the genuine separating the performance from parody, the crucial difference between Jim Carrey doing James Dean and actually being James Dean.

The Bikeriders follows the source book’s project to enshrine its subjects in legend, elevating them to a larger-than-life stature that meshes with Butler’s god-given, time-honed aura. The film’s elegiac final act leaves us with a parting sorrow that we don’t make men like this anymore, a nostalgic view all too familiar to moviegoers in search of a true screen idol to gawp at. Maybe Butler has made the splash so many other pretty faces haven’t—and maybe he’s done it predominantly in period pieces—for that feeling that he’s come to us from another time, unstuck from a classical era.

And that’s precisely how Lucia, and Kathy, and the million other admirers responsible for trebuchet-launching him to fame gaze upon him, a living trick of the light made real.

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