****/****
starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon
based on the book by Danny Lyon
written and directed by Jeff Nichols
by Walter Chaw It’s hard to feel sorry for men, because the tragedy of so many of them is that they are only able to express themselves through violence. Our culture fetishizes violence, genders it male, and admires men who enact it while pathologizing those incapable of expressing themselves productively. Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders is another of his films about men trapped inside repressive systems: punished for their intuition, for tenderness and kindness, for love, for heaven’s sake. His films aren’t complicated, but in their romantic simplicity, they can be dazzlingly, emotionally complex. What causes brothers to fight at their father’s funeral? A man to mortgage everything he has to build a storm shelter? Another to ferry an unusual boy he fears he can’t protect across the country to the care of people who can? Nichols’s films are the stories of us all as victims of our hardwiring, whether it’s you who stands before me or me who can’t get out of my own way. They are elegies because there are few happy endings for men who choose violence or the people who would like to forgive them even when they’ve done nothing but keep the gentle parts of themselves encased in sinew and rage. I wanted to disappear inside The Bikeriders.
It’s the latter half of the 1960s, and Chicago’s Vandals motorcycle club spends its time going on rides, staging sprawling picnics, and getting into tussles with rivals as well as any locals who happen to run afoul of them. The leader of the pack is Johnny (Tom Hardy), who talks like Marlon Brando in a tetchy squeak and beholds the world as an extension of László Benedek’s 1953 The Wild One, which Johnny saw one night on his little black-and-white television in his suburban Chicago home. In that film, Brando’s Johnny is famously asked what he’s rebelling against and lets loose with, “Whaddya got?” Our Johnny looks around like someone who’s just heard the best thing anybody’s ever said and wonders if he’s the only one. “Whaddya got?” he whispers to himself. Unquiet in the arms of a wife and kids, Johnny decides he prefers the company of arrested boys who can’t see themselves in traditional societal roles. He starts the Vandals, and for a little while, everything is beautiful. The Bikeriders is based on a photojournal by the legendary photographer Danny Lyon, who, as a young man, embedded himself with the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle gang, documenting their lives with pictures and ultimately capturing the moment we collectively turned down a dark road. Nichols has always worked in these liminal spaces. He’d be the perfect shepherd of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.
The Outlaws, in their slow turn towards white nationalism, murder, drugs, and prostitution, are a microcosm of our disillusionment. There’s an innocence about The Wild One. Society in the cinema of 1953 is still restored at the end of rebellions with or without a cause. By 1968 and the publication of Lyon’s book, which coincided with an escalation in Vietnam and the release of Easy Rider, the endings got dark, and we stopped believing there was anywhere left to run to. Johnny’s right-hand man is handsome, mad Benny (Austin Butler), known for his ferocious fidelity to the Vandals and a penchant for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Benny meets lanky, no-nonsense, Ginger Rogers-esque Kathy (Jodie Comer) at a bar one night, plays the white knight in giving her a lift home, and somewhere along the way, somewhere on the expressway, Kathy falls hopelessly in love. That’s all there is to The Bikeriders: two broken men find a family with other lost boys in an asphalt Neverland, and a girl tries to save them as the curtain comes down inexorably on their era like a ceremonial douter on a votive candle at the end of Mass.
Really, The Bikeriders is a eulogy for the desire to start over in the ashes of our failed society as a meritocracy built on physical prowess, braggadocio, and the courage of martyrs to lost causes. It’s not dissimilar to David Milch’s “Deadwood” in that way. The picture is also about the love men have for one another during wartime, even if the conflagrations are only of their own creation, born of their frustration and fear. It’s about how the love between men can be desperate because it is unacceptable and inexpressible in every way except through violence. Other boys eventually come to challenge Johnny for his position–some have just returned from a real war, and their dreams are not of rebuilding civilization but of dragging the world into their confusion and chaos. Guns break a social contract in The Bikeriders; drugs, too. Both represent the unsuitability of this country for the idealism, the macho chivalric samurai bullshit codes of old men that we wield like an aegis–wear like armour–when we create the list of rules for our childhood-clubhouse utopias. When things seemed simpler, were simpler. You see it in Akira Kurosawa’s Sengoku-era epics: the intrusion of guns as not merely contraband but a kind of monstrous, industrialized rudeness. Jeff Nichols marches to the same drumbeats. He’s carried on the same dismal tides. We were glorious for a time, and now that time is gone. The Bikeriders is the best Walter Hill film Walter Hill didn’t make.
