‘The Bikeriders’ Is Hell — and a Community of Throwback Male Misfits — on Wheels

They were the original One-Percenters — not the richest of the richest, the elite within the elite, but “the one percent who don’t fit and don’t care… We’ve punched our way out of a hundred rumbles, stayed alive with our boots and our fists.” That first-hand quotes opens Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, the definitive account of the motorcycle gang that was both the emblem of pure, uncut postwar freedom and a nightmare for “respectable” society. They’re coming to your town, they’re gonna party it down, they’re an American band of greasy, filthy, beer-swilling gearheads who don’t give a fuck. These were misfits who found liberation on two wheels and lived by their own violent, self-governing codes. The book begins with them recognizing the Gonzo King as a kindred spirit. It ends with them stomping him en masse.

The Angels weren’t the only biker club in the USA, just the best-known; there were lots of others. Like, for example, the Outlaws, whose main chapter operated out of Chicago and allowed photographer Danny Lyons to interview and shoot them as they hung out, worked on their choppers and went on long runs. He also recorded interviews with a number of the members, as well as a few of their wives and girlfriends. The end result, The Bikeriders, is a minor classic of modern photo-anthropology — a late ’60s document of both a specific subculture and a moment in which the nation’s Id coughed up an oil-splattered alt-version of the DIY American Dream. No wonder filmmaker Jeff Nichols fell under its spell when he came across the book in his younger years. It’s a transmission from a lost Greaser Nirvana.

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What’s smart about the writer-director’s attempt to turn The Bikeriders into a full-fledged biker flick is that he’s fully aware he’s adapting a bound portfolio for the screen. Lyons himself is a character, played by Challengers’ Mike Faist as one part impartial shutterbug, one part therapist with a mic and one part scruffy historian. There is a story of sorts here, a love triangle of sorts between Benny (Austin Butler), the gang’s resident lost-soul heartthrob; Kathy (Jodie Comer), his long-suffering spouse and de facto narrator; and the club itself, rechristened the Vandals and embodied by its stoic founder, Johnny (Tom Hardy, at his absolute most Tom Hardiest). You get plenty of conflict, if little concrete resolution. And like all empires, this gang will experience a rise, a heyday, a Rubicon crossing and a fall.

Yet Nichols’ take on the material is really to present things less a trad narrative than as a series of vignettes, all of which are boiled down to artfully aged, grime-dusted visuals and an experiential vibe. It’s a moving-picturebook, drifting from hazy barrooms to muddy-track brawls to working-class homes and haunts, and with an eye on the cumulative effect of so much vintage cool on display. Remember that chestnut about a retro ’50s diner being a wax museum with a pulse? This is a gallery exhibit with a Harley Panhead engine, restored and customized for maximum nostalgic vroom.

Iconography has always been a key part of biker gangs, biker culture and biker movies: the shock-the-squares signifiers (swastikas, iron crosses), the identifying insignias, the leather jackets and cuffed jeans. Lyons’ photo tome chronicled the uniform that was or less put into place by 1953’s The Wild One, a movie that’s referenced both literally — legend has it Johnny was inspired to start the Vandals after catching the movie on TV — and metaphorically here, via Hardy’s extremely Brando-channeling, Cro-Mag-with-a-heart-of-chrome performance. The photographer/author also gave readers an inside look into a mostly white, mostly blue-collar world with all of its edges frayed, however, and it’s the class and outcast aspects that Nichols leans into the heaviest. Go back to the Golden Age of biker movies, a.k.a. 1967-69, and for every dangerously unhinged Dennis Hopper turn on display, you’ll find a lot more Hollywood hippies in Hell’s Angel cosplay. The Bikeriders’ ensemble cast lets Butler handle the pretty-boy duties solo. Every other member of the Vandals looks like a factory worker or a genuinely feral fringe-dweller on a bender, all the better to immerse you in this Kodachrome time capsule. You can virtually smell the cheap wine and axle grease on them.

Lyons’ book also utilized a long, taped conversation with Kathy Bauer, the real-life Benny’s wife, as a dispatch from this dirty-fingernail netherworld. A lot of that gets repurposed near-verbatim as voiceover read by Comer, in what may be the most impressive feat of regional mimicry in ages. The Liverpudlian Killing Eve star has already given the world a host of impressive aural acrobatics; her over-the-top take on Bauer’s Midwestern accent is so perfectly convincing because it’s so authentically caricaturish, setting the tone for the rest of her Comer-chameleon performance. Yet that accomplishment pales in comparison what she’s doing in terms of Kathy’s state of mind. Her patience, resolve and perseverance get chipped away with every tug-of-war game she loses for Benny’s soul. When one particularly dangerous encounter breaks her, Comer gives you glimpses into every crack and fracture, as each of them finally meet web-like in the middle. She’s the heart of the movie, first by default and then by design.

As for Butler and Hardy, the former is the beauty — when the Elvis actor does the James Dean trick of moving his head, waiting a beat and then letting his eyes follow, it’s like watching old-school movie stardom in hyperdrive — and the latter is the brains and the brawn. Both of these actors clearly worship at the altar of 20th Century Method Vulnerability, which syncs up nicely with the period-piece aspect of this look back at male anger; the one-two punch of strength and sensitivity that allowed Brando, et al. to redefine American masculinity for a generation of performers is as much a part of their uniform here as leather and denim. Hardy, in particular, makes the most of his strong, silent archetype by adding not just simmering menace but subliminal currents of existential despair and dead-end weariness. It’s a potent mix of subzero cool and extreme heat that he’s bringing to this party. Challenged over his leadership, he casually asks whether his opponent prefers fists or knives. Begging Butler’s Benny to take over the gang during a late-night bonfire, Hardy’s character moves in so close to his protégé’s personal space that you wonder if someone subversively slipped a reel of Scorpio Rising into the screening.

The Bikeriders doesn’t necessarily come to praise these road warriors, nor does it want to bury the memory of them entirely. Nichols has said he was trying to capture the bygone sense of rebellion and radical disruption these gangs represented, as well as the vintage-hip vibe he felt when he flipped through Lyons’ book. Thanks to his holy trinity of leads — not to mention a clutch rogue’s gallery that includes Michael Shannon’s brutish loose cannon, Damon Herriman’s right-hand man, and Beau Knapp and Karl Glusman’s Mutt & Jeff double act — you walk away feeling like he hit the greasysexycool bullseye. The filmmaker also knows that, to quote a wise man, to live outside the law you must be honest, and once a younger generation start bumrushing their way into the Vandals’ freedom’s-just-another-word-for-nuthin’-left-to-lose shindig, you can see the necessary notion of honor among thieves slowly riding into the sunset. Those original pics captured a fleeting, flipped bird to the world in amber. The movie knows that nihilistic gesture may feel slightly stilted now. But it still wants to pay tribute to the memory of yesteryear’s gloriously extended middle fingers.

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