Jeff Nichols | 1hr 56min
Girl-next-door Kathy Bauer was simply not meant for a life of marriage to a gangster, and as one of the few voices of reason in The Bikeriders, it is apparent that she was never going to shed her outsider status. Still, her wide-eyed innocence is no match for Benny’s rugged good looks, cool swagger, and romantic persistence, seeing him patiently wait outside her house all night until her boyfriend packs up and leaves out of frustration. The peril that comes with his membership in the Vandals Motorcycle Club is inconsequential – he is the type of man she never believed she would date, yet who has somehow tapped into a deep, primal lust for danger.
At first glance, it appears that this is Jeff Nichols’ take on an S.E. Hinton novel, exploring the nuances of 1960s greaser subculture with equal parts sensitivity and scepticism. Theirs is a community that looks out for its own people, fostering a rare kind of male bonding that cannot be found in mainstream society, even as they put up tough facades. The framing device which keeps returning to photojournalist Danny Lyon’s interviews lends itself far more to distant rumination than immersion though, and covers a greater span of time than Hinton’s coming-of-age stories. These are not teenagers railing against a conservative older generation, but adults realising that their glory days are slowly seeping away, while younger gangsters emerging in the scene threaten to push them out.
If that wasn’t enough to separate The Bikeriders from Hinton’s work, then the busy Chicago setting takes this story far away from the small-town decay of Tulsa, Oklahoma, being notably marked by an array of glaring vocal transformations. While Austin Butler slips easily into a Midwestern dialect and Tom Hardy mumbles his way through a nasally Marlon Brando impression, Jodie Comer fully adopts a Fargo-style accent, imitating the real Kathy from the historic photobook upon which the film is based. Her role as narrator across eight years of a tumultuous marriage fully justifies this daring commitment – in those stretches where she is present only through voiceover, it is evident that she is a misfit among misfits.
It would take someone who has never seen Goodfellas to miss the endless allusions to Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic here, with this narration being just the first of many. When we are first introduced to Benny in a brawl, the freeze frame which lands half a second before a shovel strikes the back of his head heavily evokes our first meeting with Henry Hill, and our sudden launch into a pop-rock soundtrack and voiceover only confirms the parallel. Following a jump back to the early days of Kathy and Benny’s relationship, the camera floats around a hazy bar as she lists the names of his biker friends, before the narrative eventually catches back up to the opening scene and reveals its dangerous consequences.
That The Bikeriders treads dangerously close to being derivative of a far greater influence is no reason to disregard what is otherwise an admirable film though, standing well on its own merits. Nichols shows flashes of visual inspiration around the motorcycles themselves, turning them into icons of liberation cruising along in slow-motion and piercing the darkness with bleary headlights, while the patterned period décor of Kathy’s home frequently grounds us in a far humbler, more ordinary life. The cast he gathers here including Michael Shannon and Norman Reedus also fills out the ensemble with magnetic personalities, building a lively community within the Vandals that will inevitably fall to its own recklessness.
For some members, the end arrives with a devastating motorcycle accident, while Kathy’s patience runs out after a harrowing sexual assault at a party. Most of all though, it is simply the nature of a culture that constantly renews itself that threatens to end the “golden age of motorcycles,” supplanting these middle-aged men with younger, cockier replacements. Beyond this fraternity at least, there is another type of freedom to be sought which tears away the stoic front of the strongest man, letting them finally express their stifled anguish and shame. Those who live fast and die young may be immortalised in The Bikeriders, but perhaps the true winners are those who live long enough to find their own peace, holding gratefully onto what little they have left.
The Bikeriders is currently playing in cinemas.
