The Bikeriders starring Austin Butler and Jodie Comer is full of grit, leather and hogs, but really it’s a look at tragic masculinity

The Bikeriders starring Austin Butler and Jodie Comer is full of grit, leather and hogs, but really it’s a look at tragic masculinity
  • PublishedJuly 9, 2024

If there’s one thing the movies could do with more of, it’s Austin Butler astride a Harley Davidson in leather and cut-off denim, the thrum of the engine matched only by his low-slung Midwestern drawl.

He might purr like a kitten on the press circuit, but on screen the Elvis star is all smoulder and soft butch swagger, fixing the camera with a seductive gaze that suggests a millennial incarnation of the doomed sad boy — James Dean with a Letterboxd account, maybe, or the Mickey Rourke you’d bring home to meet the parents.

In The Bikeriders, Butler is motorcycle boy Benny Cross, a moody hothead running with a Chicago biker gang known as the Vandals, a fictionalised version of the real-life Outlaws Motorcycle Club.

Written and directed by American indie stalwart Jeff Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter), the movie is drawn from the book by photographer Danny Lyon (played in the movie by Challengers star Mike Faist), who interviewed members of the Outlaws at various points between 1965 and 1973.

A young man and woman talk in front of a motorbike and a pile of logs
Benny has been described as a “walking red flag” when it comes to his relationship with Kathy. But she is determined to save him. (Focus Features)

It’s the era of Easy Rider and The Wild Angels, a time when booze-fuelled greaser gangs were transitioning into the harder, druggier biker crews that terrorised a nation in socio-political turmoil.

But Nichols’ film is less a wild ride down the open highway than a sombre study of masculinity in flux, a requiem for a passing age that’s steeped in sadness and a sense of defeat.

Framed by Lyons’ interviews with Benny’s wife, Kathy Cross (Jodie Comer, nailing the peculiar Midwestern accent of her subject), The Bikeriders is a saga that plays out across a decade, bearing witness to the changing codes and power dynamics of the biker world.

Kathy recalls her introduction to the Chicago chapter of the Vandals, led by Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), a family man inspired to form a motorcycle crew after seeing Marlon Brando’s “whaddya got?” moment of rebellion in The Wild One.

It’s an inspiration that Hardy — still one of the most eccentric movie stars we have — has taken to heart. His Johnny sounds like Brando crossed with an animated squirrel, a goofiness that’s set in stark contrast with his muscular brutality.

Tom Hardy sits on the ground next to Austin Butler, both in motorcycle leathers, drinking from bottles
Tom Hardy told Variety he wanted to counteract stereotypes about what a gang leader would be like in The Bikeriders, deciding to play Johnny as a “tragic clown”.(Focus Features.)

We watch as Kathy falls for Benny’s brooding bad boy, and thrill as he takes her for their first spin to a soundtrack — pretty much required by movie law — of the Shangri-La’s.

She’s torn between her love for him and her growing disillusionment with the Vandals, a gang trapped in a cycle of violence as new chapters — and challengers — spring up across the Midwest.

What was once a community of outsiders soon becomes a sprawling turf war, where ruthless upstarts like The Kid (Australian actor Toby Wallace) flout tradition in a play for Johnny’s throne.

Bruised and sometimes beautiful, The Bikeriders is at its best when wrestling with this turbulent changing of the guard, when its rock ‘n’ roll rumbles scored to Van Morrison (reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders) give way to seedy parties soaked in the sound of The Stooges.

A woman looks concerned as she stands outside a liquor shop.
“I would say that Kathy’s accent is probably the hardest one that I’ve done,” Jodie Comer told The Hollywood Reporter. (Focus Features)

In a supporting performance that might be the movie’s best, longtime Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon captures the conflict as an old-school burnout adrift in a new world.

With its graphic violence and male territorialism, The Bikeriders can’t help but evoke the crime sagas of Martin Scorsese, particularly 1973’s era-adjacent Mean Streets, a film rife with rock ‘n’ roll needle drops and explosive energy.

But Nichols is a more modest filmmaker who doesn’t have a taste for the highs of the life he’s critiquing.

There’s no seduction to his storytelling to draw us in, and no real sexiness; he doesn’t tease out the melodrama in the conflict, nor bring the inherent eroticism — homo or otherwise — to the fore.

Four motorcyclists ride along a road, pictured from behind.
The film might have a lot of good looking vintage motorbikes, but it’s actually more about masculinity.(Focus Features.)

By the time the film cycles back around to the high drama and melancholy of the Shangri Las’ Out in the Streets, the distance between its ambition and execution has become hard to ignore.

In less than three haunted, heartbreaking minutes, the girl group sketches the memory of an era with a gravity that The Bikeriders struggles to summon in two hours.

But don’t let that stop you. After all, there’s much pleasure to be found in these movie-star performances, in the grit and texture of their world. Sometimes that’s enough to get your motor runnin’.

SOURCE: ABCNEWS

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