Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jeff Nichols
Starring: Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, Boyd Holbrook, Damon Herriman
Have you ever seen any of those awful British movies about football
hooligans that seem to be released straight to VOD on a weekly basis? You
know the type. They always star some combination of Danny Dyer, Craig
Fairbrass and Tamer Hassan, sometimes all three. The directors always try
to emulate Goodfellas, but their attempts to use voiceover to draw us into a world of pathetic
masculinity always come off as lazy storytelling. Most of these movies
open with a scene in which the protagonist finds himself cornered by some
rivals, and the frame freezes just as he takes a punch to his mush,
followed by some sort of exaltation along the lines of "You're probably
wondering how a geezer like me got myself in such a norty pickle."
With The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols seems to have borrowed this tiresome template and
swapped out the football hooligans for a 1960s Chicago biker gang. It has
the same sub-Scorsese storytelling and the same half-assed interrogation
of why men need to form a gang to justify hanging out with other men. It
opens with a freeze frame of a lead character taking a shovel to his
noggin. And of course it features the obligatory angry wife who at some
point will scream "I can't live like this no more" while her hubby insists
that she can't understand why he needs the buzz.
The angry wife here is Kathy (Jodie Comer), who finds herself
hitched to surly and silent biker Benny (Austin Butler), an
improbably pretty member of the Vandals motorcycle gang. Nichols charts
how the gang is formed when leader of the pack Johnny (Tom Hardy)
catches a showing of The Wild One on TV and becomes besotted
by Brando's rebellious biker. Hardy has long been compared to Brando, both
favourably and unfavourably, so it's amusing to see him play a
character who is literally emulating the star. We go on to see how the
gang grows, with various offshoot chapters around the American MidWest,
and how violence seeps in when a new breed of angry and addicted young men
arrive home from Vietnam. The latter is represented by a character simply
named "The Kid", who is played by the charismatic young Aussie actor
Toby Wallace and is basically a rehash of John Leguizamo's "Benny
Blanco from the Bronx" of Carlito's Way, the violent young buck who carries a grudge when he's disrespected by
the elder figure he looks up to, which in this case is Johnny.
Nichols' film is inspired by a coffee table book by photographer
Danny Lyon, who is played here by rising star Mike Faist.
Over the '60s and '70s, Lyon conducted numerous interviews with bikers and
it's one such interview with Kathy that provides the film with its framing
device. It's an odd choice to make Kathy the sole narrator rather than
allowing Benny to also have his say as it means we only get her
perspective, which often amounts to the viewer being lectured on what they
should take from the events presented; it's like if
Goodfellas were narrated solely by Lorraine Bracco's
character and we didn't get Ray Liotta's take. Kathy describes her initial
seduction into this leather clad world, but she turns sour too quickly.
Unlike Goodfellas, which lures us into the world of gangsters through an adrenalised focus
on its glamourous side, The Bikeriders never lets us see through Benny's eyes, so we're never sucked in.
For all of both Kathy and Johnny's doting over him, Benny is barely
present; we hear about him more than we see him. He's so devoid of
personality and charm that we wonder what Kathy and Johnny see in the
dullard. Kathy's narration is too often lazily deployed to set up scenes, a tactic
that annoyingly tells us what's about to happen before we see it actually
happen. It's a baffling way to tell a story.
While few of the cast members look like they belong in this rough and
tumble world, certainly not the cherubic Comer, it's nonetheless filled with
engaging performances. Wallace enlivens the movie every time he pops up, and
you might come away wishing he had swapped roles with Butler. Comer's
bizarre attempt at a MidWest accent is initially disarming, but despite
neither looking nor sounding the part, she's always engaging. Hardy does
another of his trademark funny voices, but like Comer, he makes it work and
he's very convincing as a dumb guy who thinks he has everything sussed.
Norman Reedus is fun as a Californian biker in the
Easy Rider mould and Nichols regular
Michael Shannon adds some much needed humour as a crazy
Latvian.
If you're hoping for some insights into biker culture you'll have to look
elsewhere (might I suggest George A. Romero's Knightriders?), as it's simply window dressing here. You could swap out the bikers for
Italian mobsters or English soccer yobs and it would make little difference.
As window dressing goes however, it's always visually appealing, as Nichols
does a fine job of capturing the era without ever resorting to shortcut
signifiers like news reports of Nam or race riots on background TVs. The
roar of the engines and the crunch of leather will likely reel you in during
its opening scenes, but the thrill soon wears off. If Nichols' film at first
resembles '50s Brando, all taut muscles and charisma, it ends up more like
'90s Brando, a bloated, mumbling reminder of what might have been.
The Bikeriders is on UK/ROI VOD now.
