How to describe The Bikeriders, the beautifully formless new film by writer-director Jeff Nichols? An acting showcase, the production moves its characters about but offers little in the way of traditional plotting. A marriage story, it nevertheless encompasses the loss of national innocence and the professionalization of American crime. Perhaps the best thing to say of the new picture is that it is about its subjects: the members of a lightly fictionalized motorcycle club in Vietnam War-era Illinois. Based on a photobook of the same name by Danny Lyon, the film plays like a collection of snapshots. What they add up to is Nichols’s best work in years.
The movie stars Austin Butler as Benny Cross, a Chicago bike hound whom we meet on the cusp of an altercation. Wearing his club “colors” in a bar in 1969, Benny attracts the attention of two crosstown rivals boasting murderous expressions. Rather than back down, our young man jaws off, provoking a fight that nearly costs him his life. But isn’t that a smirk we see on his face when, about to be jumped, he reaches for his knife?
Nichols has long been fascinated by the promise and perils of masculinity, a connective tissue that holds together an otherwise chaotic oeuvre. In his best film, 2011’s Take Shelter, a family man visited by apocalyptic dreams builds a storm bunker no one wants. (Spoiler alert: They’re wrong.) 2016’s Loving, meanwhile, celebrates the capacity of marital fidelity to undo grievous wrongs. Even the director’s little-seen Midnight Special, a sci-fi thriller pitting fatherhood against feds and faith, pulls ostentatiously in this direction. Frequent Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon is a former cultist on the lam with his supernatural son. A far from perfect figure, he is still the best hope the boy has.
Unsurprisingly, Shannon has a role in The Bikeriders. He plays Zipco, a wine-addled burnout who falls in with the film’s featured club, the Vandals, after a rejection by his local draft board. Other members have similar stories. Cockroach (Emory Cohen) wants to be a motorcycle cop but can’t get out of his own well-intentioned way. Sonny (Norman Reedus, inevitably) wants the club’s companionship so badly that he moves across the country to pursue it. In Nichols’s hands, these damaged, difficult men are heroes of a sort, bound together in a brotherhood of choice and embracing loyalty as the highest good. “These guys,” one character remarks midway through the film, “don’t belong nowhere else. So they belong together.”
The club’s founder, guiding light, and chief is one Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), a middle-aged bike enthusiast who starts the Vandals after watching Marlon Brando’s The Wild One on television. Indeed, there is something of Brando’s pinched tenor in Hardy’s performance, which, though mannered, is nonetheless the actor’s best work since his riveting turn in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. World-weary but quietly intense, Johnny is the walking representation of the club’s smash-the-rules ethos. Unopposed to, say, premeditated arson when honor demands it, Johnny is no saint. Neither, however, is he a killer, in clear contradistinction to the younger toughs already visible on the nation’s sociocultural horizon.
Among the film’s concerns is the slowly-then-all-at-once process by which Johnny’s rule gives way to a harder generation’s. Another is Benny’s marriage to Kathy Bauer, the movie’s sweet but fiery narrator and audience avatar. Played by the wonderful Jodie Comer (Killing Eve, Thirteen), Kathy bears more than a little resemblance to Karen Hill, the Lorraine Bracco character in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. At once thrilled and horrified by her husband’s outlaw lifestyle, Kathy is all disapproval and worry, at least when she isn’t riding along. “I used to be respectable,” the young woman sighs, preparing for yet another evening by her reckless husband’s side. What is respectability, though, compared to the feeling of the wind in one’s hair?
If there is a tension at the heart of The Bikeriders, its source is our undeniable knowledge that Benny and company are not really the good guys. Petty criminals and layabouts, our protagonists spend most of the film sitting around, day-drinking, talking motorcycles, and riding. Elsewhere in contemporaneous America, men and women were pioneering the heart transplant and going to the moon. It is absurd, in other words, to feel nostalgia for the Vandals. That we do — that nostalgia is, in fact, the film’s roaring engine — is a mark of Nichols’s skill.
So, too, is the director’s ability to wrest significance from a script that lacks utterly the familiar Aristotelian or Freytagian elements (rising action, climax, et cetera). Instead, The Bikeriders is reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) and deserves to win a similar cult status. In that superb baseball picture, college athletes lie around, get into trouble, shoot the breeze, and attend the occasional practice. Nobody accomplishes much, but, then again, we don’t need them to. It’s fun just to watch them (fail to) work.
The Bikeriders is pretty much the same movie. Whatever hopes we have that its characters will grow or overcome the odds are dashed right good. It’s a cool hang though. Sometimes at the cinema, that’s enough.
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Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.