
If some director has a finicky job trying to recapture an age that is Jeff Nichols, the director of The Bikeriders. Benny a biker emerges and sits with his back bent leaning against the bar. The camera closes in on the two older men closing into Benny. These men have a message for Benny either take off your colors or leave the bar. As Benny quietly listens to their ultimatum we take in his face Yes, his bulging veins of the torn thread on the jacket worn fearing skull insignia of Chicago vandals’ club, and of course the distinctive sharp features of a butler. Benny’s face has cigarette smoke rolled over it, his finger actually drummed the rim of the whiskey glass. Benny replies in his characteristic brief style You would have to kill me. It is a task these two men will gladly perform, They yank him into the street and pound him hard. Benny slashes one man’s face with a knife hidden in his boot. His rugged tired raspy face goes through a twisted sadistic smile as another guy approaches, shovel raised high above his head ready to smash the back of Benny’s head. Still shot.
While it is a good one emotionally, thanks to the near perfect attention to the period, it suggests a certain culture and tells us about the man.
The film works satisfactorily for a moment during the moment of his life. That moment captures Neil Nichols‘s thought process as a filmmaker, borrowing elements from Danny Lyon’s book in which the latter infiltrated Midwestern biker communities between 1965 and 73. However, he loses focus of the man at the center of the scene or the documentary over which he stands, he is not able to balance it. In simple terms The Bikeriders, promises visually to be an aesthetically striking film with a specific character but is unable to create or replicate that feeling.
It first struggles because a clear focus is not apparent. Kathy (Jodie Comer) is appointed as a way into this world by Nichols Lyon (Mike Faist), who attends her interviews throughout the film and meets her for the first time at the laundromat in 1965. She remembers that one of her girlfriends took her out one night because she wanted to visit a bar owned by the “Vandals.” She was wearing a purple sweater and white Levis pants, which were appropriate for the occasion. A typical room filled with rough-looking men in leather and denim jackets with no tops or earrings is not her type of scene. She feels like she wants to go but is held back because of Benny who is at the pool table.
However, Kathy is an outlier in that society is baffled by norms, customs, and politics. The only known fact indeed, is that she lives in a middle-class brownstone in the Midwest with her blue collared spouse who after relaxing on their house with his bike in the night, she later mentions runs off in fright thanks to Benny. Eventually, Kathy introduces us to the other members of the club Level-headed Brucie (Damon Herriman), gearhead Cal (Boyd Holbrook) unstable Latvian fu’ry at not being able to serve in Vietnam, Zipco (Michael Shannon), cockroach (Emory Cohen) who is too weird to make up characters which she hardly believes. She fabricates the story of Johnny (Tom Hardy) forming the gang after seeing Marlon Brando dressed as a greaser in the film The Wild One. In reality, though, the racing club was started because of zeg running’s love of speed. In any case, Johnny who we never see doing a 9-5 job or his wife and children, is one of the men presented through stunning images or a direct cut to the man.
He craves connection and let’s be honest: the post-war ideals of white picket fences are practically worthless. Like Kathy, he has this illusion of freedom in Benny’s reckless devotion a man who has no second thoughts about jumping into a fight with Indiana bikers to protect his brother’s honor.
The Bikeriders for the most part is at its best when viewing the other characters from the periphery through the lens of Benny and Kathy. They are younger than the men in the Vandals, with no business wanting and needing the same things as them. This way we see this couple grow up with the Vandals from being a friendly bunch of nerds pretending as though they are bored with their lives dressed up in ill-fitting rebellion to a club with several branches in the Midwest. Individually, these men are cowards in unison, they howl as a pack, exchanging wisecracks and advice and emotions like perplexed puppies in the dog park. Explosive images of heavy, muscular motorcycles rolling over the placid flatlands illustrate the tension the men wish to convey and who they are really softer spirits who exist in the corners of their shadow.
The first 30 minutes of the film written to the songs of the 1950s is stunning in its ability to recreate the golden age of early bike culture and the people living through it.
However, he finds it difficult to imagine the shift in who the audience focused on, how the return of Vietnam War veterans with PTSD, and the youth culture shift affected the focus on Kathy and Benny and shifted it to Johnny and Kathy. Given the circumstances, Hardy tries to address the kaleidoscope of motives within Johnny as best he can swallowing expectations for you to be anywhere near Comer. It’s not only her Midwestern accent which sounds awkward as this band tries to do regionally specific accents in different ways which is worse and it’s also that she is still a cartoon character. Where, unfortunately, once again, neither helps that the character is vaguely written. The characters do not interact almost at all in the scenes Kathy and Benny there are far too few and includes the question: what in their married life do they really share?
So far in the narrative, it is mostly a background noise. Even though the bikers who are also veterans come into the picture quite fast and ruin the sense of brotherly love because they now are part of a “gang”, the Vietnam War is not depicted on TV, radio, or in midwestern suburbs with no soldier advertising out on the streets or posters for recruitment that were all around given how many would have been drafted and why.
One gets the feeling that the film wants to draw a link between the war and the still unserviced disruptive youth, particularly an ominous Toby Wallace but this is more like a token collar to the hit-and-run illustration.
However, I will admit that when The Bikeriders was first released, I was not impressed by the manner in which Butler performed. Perhaps it is because after portraying the personification of an era in the film Elvis, I did not have high expectations of seeing him do so in a different context, more specifically as a biker. And yet in the second viewing of Bikeriders, he is the one who dictates the moment. He is likeable and the camera is on him manipulating light across his features to in turn control his heat his sadness and fragility in precise degrees. There is a filthy and yet raw type of masculinity that he performs with ease which Nichols is an excited fan of And then as soon as he steps out the screen, not only does the group lose its glamour but so does the movie. There is never a way for Nichols to capture anyone’s interest again as the plot and the characters are just extremely flaky far too inadequately copied likenesses from Lyons’ photographs to make you care about their gravity.
Butler’s absence in the second half of the film further distances it from grand reality where everything was much better the film becomes focused on nothing but out of place childish fantasies. I suppose it works in some ways especially in a film depicting young men who rather act out the parts of revolutionaries than succumbing to the illusion of the American dream and making an honest living. However, the absence of such characters as Butler weakens the film’s impact, making it unimaginative and uncoordinated enough that one cannot feel nostalgic towards the block that the film seeks to emulate. Moreover, it very loosely positions itself in a history that we can associate with an “Easy Rider” style. As illusions are peeled off so does “The Bikeriders”, which slowly fades into the horizon along with the ideals it portrayed.
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