‘What are you rebelling against?’
‘Whaddya got?’
The Wild One
With The Bikeriders, anthropological director Jeff Nichols makes his welcome return to feature filmmaking after years of languishing in directors jail as various projects stalled in the planning stages. After a proposed Alien Nation remake floundered, Nichols briefly entertained the notion of dabbling in franchise filmmaking with the third Quiet Place film before realising it wouldn’t be a good fit for him. In the meantime, he scripted a podcast based on the popular kids series Hank the Cowdog, with Mud collaborator Matthew McConaughey providing his unique vocal talent to the show.
The Bikeriders follows Kathy (a captivating Jodie Comer) as she slinks into the world of The Vandals, a Midwestern motorcycle club headed up by Tom Hardy’s Johnny, an increasingly thuggish leader who is comfortably supported by members like Benny (a Brando-esque Austin Butler), Brucie (a weathered Damon Herriman), and Zipco (Nichols regular Michael Shannon). We first meet Kathy as she’s being interviewed by Mike Faist’s Danny, a college graduate seeking to document the emerging bike culture in America with interviews and photographs and create a book about their life. Danny is Danny Lyon, the inspiration for The Bikeriders, with the film pulling its eponymous roots from the photographer’s 1968 book of the same name.
As with his 2016 film Loving, the story of interracial couple Richard and Mildred Loving whose marriage led to a legal battle that overturned anti-interracial marriage and anti-miscegenation laws in America, Nichols uses The Bikeriders to explore the shifting state of America with the rise of bikie gangs against the turbulent years of the Sixties and Seventies. This era saw the proliferation of the Hells Angels outlaw motorcycle clubs across America, leading to the rise of illegal activities within some charters.
The Vandals are Nichols surrogate for the Hells Angels, with the filmmaker immersing the audience immediately into the world of motorcycle culture in a way that gets your heart racing, invigorating the senses with the bass-heavy thump of a motorbike’s exhaust as it kicks into life while the racing beat of a drum ushers in the sticky licks of the jukebox soundtrack that blasts everything from Gary U.S. Bonds, The Animals, Bo Diddley, and more. Nichols intention is clear: he wants you to know what it feels like to fall in love with motorcycle life, and in doing so he paints the portrait of why Comer’s Kathy would fall head first into the world of leather clad, grime soaked men who beat each other up for a lark and share a bloody beer afterwards.
Cinematographer Adam Stone is Nichols frequent collaborator, and it’s with The Bikeriders that he presents some of his finest work, painting the screen with an alluring perspective that invites the audience to lean in and become fully enamoured with the culture on screen. An early shot of a horizon at dusk sees a convoy of bikes cresting the bitumen, their headlights acting as beacons cutting through the emerging night. It’s the first of many evocative shots that are littered throughout The Bikeriders that make the film a visual spectacle the simply must be seen on the big screen, so powerful is its pull and ability to encompass all of your senses. Stone and Nichols pull you deeply into their world that you can almost smell the biting fumes of fuel and the acrid stench of stubbed cigarettes amidst a cloud of hyper-masculine body odour.
Kathy is our entry point to the world of the Vandals as she’s instantly drawn to Butler’s Benny, a bloke so deeply tied to the world of motorbikes and the culture that rises from its fumes that he has his own name tattooed on his arm, while his colours act as a second skin, a point that ends up with him being beaten in a bar by two brutes who demand he removed them in their joint. Benny refuses, leading to an all out beating and a major injury that threatens Benny’s connection with bikes and the life he lives.
It’s clear why Kathy is drawn to Benny, and Nichols delicately paints out their relationship on screen, giving both Comer and Butler the chance to deliver two exceptional performances. Comer is truly phenomenal as her initial wide-eyed nature soaking every aspect of this new world gives way to a comfortable, lived-in perspective that is shaken up in some of the films most intense and gut-tightening scenes which see the homoerotic masculinity of the Vandals sway into violent, toxic masculinity.
Nichols chooses to imbue The Bikeriders with an undercurrent of homoeroticism which is best realised in Johnny’s affection and admiration for Benny. One pivotal scene sees the two men engage in a conversation that sees them gradually lean in closer to each other’s personal space as they talk about bikes, their club, and the lives they’re living. Benny’s relationship with Johnny sees the two openly discuss personal thoughts in a way that neither man would do with their respective partners. It’s pointed that the last shot of Benny evokes a similar emotionality to the closing scenes of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
Throughout his career, Hardy has crafted a cast of queer-tinged characters, from Eddie Brock to the Krays to Bronson, with Johnny carrying a distinctly Scorpio Rising-vibe. Hardy is, as always, profoundly engaging as he delivers yet another monosyllabic turn that is difficult to decipher amidst the chorus of carburettors and exhausts that make up the sound design, but any concerns about missing vital dialogue is allayed thanks to Hardy’s ability to emote so clearly through his eyes. As with Dunkirk and Mad Max: Fury Road, Hardy works best when he’s given the chance to be a silent performer who can use his body to present his emotions, with his Johnny standing as one of his finest creations.
Further the queer-coding of the films, Nichols makes it clear that for the majority of the Vandals, motorcycle life is not a choice. When one rider dies in an accident, the men talk about the fate of his bike, mournfully stating that his family hid it away in the basement of their house as a source of shame and disgrace. Emory Cohen’s Cockroach talks about the joy of eating bugs, an act he’s acquired through the many rides across farmland. Later, Cockroach talks about his dream of becoming a highway patrol officer, a vocation he yearns for not because of the law enforcement aspect, but simply because it would be heaven to sit on a Harley and earn a living for his family. Cockroach could never be the violent figure that many relate bikie gangs with.
Hardy’s Johnny exists as the fulcrum point between the two sides of the clubs culture, with his interest in motorcycle life coming from a chance viewing of Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Brando’s somewhat opportunistic and defiant utterance of the line ‘Whaddya got?’ in response to the question of what he’s rebelling against becomes Johnny’s core ethos, leading to the creation of the Vandals. That origin then opens up Johnny’s realisation that this is the world that he’s always yearned for, but had never truly realised existed, yet, it’s also an unstable foundation, with Johnny struggling to fully contain the behemoth that he has created with new chapters springing up across the nation that seemingly go against the minimal mindset that Johnny set forth with.
It’s at the fractured nexus of motorcycle culture and bike gang culture that The Bikeriders truly steps into the realm of brilliance, as Nichols leans into the tragedy of the piece, presenting the conflicted world of the men who live and breathe motorcycles as a way of life, and for those who see the culture as a vector for illegal activities and out and out brutality. Both arms of the Vandals hinge on aspects of violence, but for the original colours, a punch is akin to a kiss, a hug, it’s a bout of affection between brothers, whereas for the emerging drug-addled dolts who crawl out of the fractures of hell across America, donning Vandals colours gives them the ability to enact violence as a method of dominance and control.
Finally, sitting at the centre of it all as an observer is Kathy, a woman convinced she can eventually pull Benny away from his life on a bike and into a world of domesticity. Comer’s Kathy stands as the sole, fully realised woman in the film, and while this may be a point of contention for some, Nichols peppers the film with moments of Kathy spending time at the laundromat, sharing stories with other partners. Nichols pointedly establishes early on that for Kathy and women of her ilk, the allure of motorcycle culture is an intoxicating one that dominates their life and becomes their personality. They are bikie wives, this is who they are.
There’s a rare quality within Jeff Nichols films that cinema has desperately yearned for. The landscape of filmmaking has shifted dramatically away from these kind of expansive, exploratory, anthropological pieces which have instead found fertile ground in the episodic television format of storytelling. For the sake of cinema, I’m grateful Nichols has returned to exploring the facets of America on film; we are a richer audience for it.
Director: Jeff Nichols
Cast: Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, Austin Butler
Writer: Jeff Nichols, (based on the work of Danny Lyon)
Producers: Sarah Green, Brian Kavanaugh Jones, Arnon Milchan
Music: David Wingo
Cinematography: Adam Stone
Editor: Julie Monroe
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