A man, his machine, and the horizon...
dir: Jeff Nichols
2024
Critics (and audiences) haven’t been kind to this film. I am not entirely sure what they were expecting. The film is called The Bikeriders. It has guys riding motorbikes. For that alone it deserves points for accuracy and honesty.
Some reviews have pointed to the fact that there’s not a lot of depth to some of the characters or what amount to their storylines, and to that I say: This film is based on a coffee table book of photographs of bikers from the early to mid 1960s: the fuck were you expecting? Anna Karenina?”
For my money, I got exactly what I wanted and exactly what I expected. This is a movie. About a biker gang. About the gloriously stupid halcyon early days, and how everything turns to shit later on. Like every story of this type.
And yet I really enjoyed it. Its joys, its charms, are ineffable, mostly, but also, what’s not to like about watching some smouldering hot guys on motorbikes for 2 hours?
Really, there’s only one. Austin Butler has a face so perfectly symmetrical that he can play Elvis, a sadistic Harkonnen, and a supposedly scuzzy biker and no-one bats an eyelid, least of all him. A face that perfect papers over a lot of potential sins, because I am not sure yet if anyone is certain he can act yet. This is not a film for acting that involves people rendering their lines in a believable manner.
This is a movie to be enjoyed for the images conjured for our eyes. Butler, as Benny, lighting a cigarette; Benny outrunning the cops on his bike, and then laughing when he runs out of gas and they catch up to him, Benny nonchalantly telling two jerks in a bar that he’ll die before he takes his colours off; the delight on Benny’s face when he’s rushing into an avoidable fight just because he wants to fuck some guys up.
I think the director knew this would be the strength of the flick, but I’m not sure audiences were ready for it. I don’t know that they’re ready to commit to Butler-mania.
Tom Hardy is in this as well. You might think you don’t need anyone else in the flick if you’ve got Austin Butler for the camera to linger upon as he leans over to play pool, or pops the top off of a beer, but a gang needs a few more bodies.
Hardy plays Johnny, the guy who started the gang in the first place. The story told in voiceover is that one day Johnny was sitting there in his family home watching the tv, and The Wild One came on, and watching that flick inspired him to start the Vandals.
Now, I am used to all sorts of bullshit to help narratives chug along, and I know that there’s little point expending a lot of energy debunking them, but that story, like most of the story told in this flick, is abject bullshit. That flick might have scenes of bikers going berserk and fucking a town up, but it’s from the 50s. Crime didn’t pay back then. Wrongdoers had to be ruthlessly punished because of the Hays Code so as not to influence the simple minded. If anyone thought anything about the film, it was about how hot they found young brutish Brando as Johnny, all in leather and such.
But Hardy doesn’t channel Brando from The Wild One here: he channels Brando from On the Waterfront. He oozes working class earthiness, and an ache for something lost, but unlike all the other chaps, he’s a working stiff and regular joe when he’s not with the gang. He is of a different generation to Benny, probably old enough to be his father, and in one charged scene, it’s not clear if he’s envious of Benny’s youth or his beauty, but there’s definitely something there. He looks like he doesn’t know if he wants to bite him or kiss him or both.
I won’t come out outright and say there’s definitely an undercurrent of homoeroticism in the flick, because, come on, making a statement like that is like shooting fish in a barrel with a glitter gun when you’re talking about a flick about a bunch of guys who really, really prefer hanging out with other guys more than their wives and girlfriends. Men yearning for camaraderie shouldn’t always have to be equated with the love that dared not speak its name back then, but there’s no doubting that Johnnie has something different going on with Benny, which is unrequited, alas.
Benny is the quintessential rebel without cause, clue or care in the world, beyond riding his bike. He would die for the club, but he doesn’t seem to care that much about anyone or anything beyond his bike. When he meets our constant narrator Kathy (Jodie Comer), he seems like he’s impressed by her, but not as struck as she is by him. When meeting a friend at a bar who needed some money, Kathy sees Benny and no longer has eyes for any other man. She explains at length everything to do with all the people we see, the history of the club, their every thought, feeling and action. It must be such a burden, bearing the weight of such omniscience. I guess after a while we can probably accept that maybe she doesn’t know everything: it’s a story told by one person about a group of people.
And at that it’s a story told to the guy who takes the photos of the gang that end up in the book, being Danny Lyon (Mike Feist). Why a photographer is recording reams and reams of tape of bikers talking about their biking ways, well, it’s an excuse to have Kathy tell everything to us (instead of the movie just fucking showing us), so that we don’t have to wonder about anything.
Now, Kathy as a character is the quintessential “I was attracted to a bad guy in a gang, and then I realised that life in a gang ain’t shit, and so I became the person who, for the rest of the film, is telling the guy to leave the gang”, but, man, goddamn, that accent. I am not sure what accent she is putting on, and I don’t know when and where it’s from, but if there’s an honorary Academy award, probably named after Meryl Streep, for accents, well, Jodie’s got it locked up. Sometimes she sounds like New Jersey; sometimes it’s that boy howdy Sherriff Gunderson Minnesotan Midwest ‘nice’ accent, and mostly I was wondering, why are they telling us all this with this terrible accent? Is she getting paid on a per word basis? Can’t you leave something, anything, to our imaginations?
Parts of the story sound genuine, in that if you’ve read stuff about motorbike culture and the rise of outlaw gangs post-World War II, it would be familiar territory. Guys initially getting together because they just like riding bikes. The organised crime element is much later on, and the theorising about vets from Vietnam coming back as hardcore addicts and contaminating the purity of what they had with the contemporary world. When the gang runs the risk of looking too anachronistic, the youngbloods come along (as embodied by the murderous Kid, played by Australia’s Own Toby Wallace), looking to take down the elders in order to take their place. And get into meth and stuff.
Mileage will definitely vary as to whether audiences get to know and like the various members of the gang. If they stand out, to me, it’s because I recognise the actors from other stuff, not because the characterisations are particularly strong or well written. Michael Shannon, who I think has been in every film this director has ever made, plays a deranged alcoholic called Zipco, who gives long, dull speeches trying to explain his stance about how everyone and everything bad is a commie pinko, and how it’s unfair that they didn’t let him go over to Vietnam to die for his adoptive country. Many of those scenes made me think this director is scared of Michael Shannon, as he well should be.
Australia’s own Damon Herriman, for once, doesn’t play an absolute lunatic, but plays Johnny’s right hand man at the club Brucie. He is, comparatively, one of the decent people in the gang, at least compared to the other pieces of shit. Boyd Holbrook for once doesn’t play a complete piece of shit, as Cal, who genuinely lives for and loves the bikes themselves. Norman Reedus, most famous for playing Daryl in The Walking Dead, appears briefly as a blow in from the Hells Angels (here called Red Devils, to not offend anyone), called Funny Sonny, with terrible teeth and a scary wig.
Maybe he’s there as a reference to my main source of knowledge on these topics, being Hunter S. Thompson’s apparently completely made up book on the Hells Angels for which he got a righteous stomping, or maybe, like most of these characters, he’s pretty much made up to suit the story. That’s the thing you can do when you look at a photo of a cool guy on a motorbike wearing his leathers: you can pretty much make up whatever the fuck you want.
There might not be much of a compelling narrative to this story, maybe much of it is predictable, or too sanitised. The greatest enemy these bikers face is the fact that they’re riding bikes at a time when road safety is not a high priority, they have virtually no protective gear and wouldn’t dream of wearing helmets (it would mess up their hairstyles, derr). So they all face the possibility that soon they too will take a sharp corner too fast, or not see a car backing out of a drive way, and die an unremarkable death. That is a far more pressing danger than death at the hands of a rival, which only comes up rarely.
Though when society changes, and the gang struggles to keep up with how vicious and skinny all the new guys are, it does provide a sad trajectory for some of these characters, when all we wanted was for them to settle down, have a gaggle of kids and get on the board of the Parents and Friends Committee at their local schools.
Kathy and Benny are hardly a love story for the ages, but they’ll do. Seeing as she’s telling us everything about everyone, because Benny doesn’t exhibit emotions throughout the flick, she will also give us a clue as to the mental landscape that he traverses over the course of the film. She tells us (through telling Danny), that Benny doesn’t have emotions, didn’t cry when his own dad died, and only got close to expressing an emotion once when, after a terrible beating, thought he’d never ride again. Phew, he just grimaced a bit, no emotions detected.
But then when he hears that the love of his life died, well, that’s a tear bonanza, that is.
I know I’m mocking large swathes of this flick, but I strangely enjoyed it immensely. I am not and never have been a joiner, the belonging kind, someone who can be part of a group. But even I got what these people were striving for, and got a sense of what it would feel like to ride in formation with the rest of a gang who would lay down their lives for you, as you would for them. This shit doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, or be dragged out. This didn’t need to be Sons of Anarchy, because anyone who wanted that already has a whole arse series to watch then.
This just needed to be “didn’t these scumbags look fucking cool doing this? Don’t you wish you could have had a beer and a smoke with them, back in the day?”
And on that score this totally succeeded, for my money.
8 times that’s when I fell for the leader of the pack out of 10
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“I’ve had nothing but trouble since I met Benny. I’ve seen more jails, have been to more courts, and met more lawyers. I mean, it can’t be love. It must just be stupidity.” – yeah, but, look at that face - The Bikeriders
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