Born to be Mild

Jeff Nichols’ "The Bikeriders" runs on an empty tank

The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols’s loose adaptation of Danny Lyon’s same-titled photo book about the Chicago Motorcycle Outlaws Club in the mid-60s, came out from the Telluride Film Festival with a significant amount of positive buzz. It had Oscars written all over it until New Regency and Disney decided to postpone its December 2023 release because of the SAG-AFTRA strike. Focus Features then acquired worldwide distribution rights for the film, aiming for a 2024 release. This rather tepid film finally reaches movie theaters nationwide as a rather lackluster adult alternative to the usual summer menu of sequels, family films and up-and-coming blockbusters. 

There’s no doubt that the material Nichols is working with and the world that he explores —the motorcycle clubs, the mythology popular culture has created around them and the toxic masculinity it attracts— is full of potential. Each of the characters he introduces throughout, in some cases by mimicking the images Lyon took of those cyclists, have a specific story to tell that I suspect would have made for a more interesting movie than what we have here. After all, Nicols has always shown a deep regard for the outsider and the outcast. Bikers are the cowboys of the highways, vroom-vrooming their way freely across the country much like those mythical Hollywood cowboys did on their horses across the plains. 

Nichols may have changed the name of the bikers club to the Chicago Vandals and fictionalized most of the story, but he has also kept the names of most of the original Outkaw members intact and even uses as dialogue some of the book’s testimonies, especially those of a woman: Kathy, an outsider who becomes a part of the club after falling for Benny (Austin Butler), the youngest member of the Vandals. She is played by British actress Jodie Comer in a voice and an accent so irritating and cartoonish that it took me out of the film whenever she was on screen. (Comer has claimed in interviews that she learned Kathy’s Chicago accent by listening to Lyons’ interview tapes. A couple of weeks of living in Chicago’s working class neighborhoods would have helped enormously.) I understand why Nichols makes Kathy the film’s narrator: she provides a different, more rooted, perspective to this very masculine world…but it is a fatal mistake.

The Bikeriders takes place between 1965 and 1973, between the innocent days of biker clubs (if there was even such a thing) and the arrival and dominance of a younger, more violent breed that turned these clubs into actual drug-dealing and drug-taking, sex-trafficking gangs. The story starts in media res as Benny, drinking alone in a bar, finds himself involved in a brawl with two working class stiffs who don’t like his jacket. As he is about to be hit in the back of his head with a shovel, the image freezes a la Scorsese in Goodfellas (the film is also full of Scorsese-like needle drops) and we cut to a laundromat where a stand-in for Lyons (a wasted Mike Faist) interviews her. There she tells him how she first met Benny: at the bar the Vandals use as their hangout after her best friend drags her there. Uncomfortable at the testosterone levels emanating from the joint, she lays eyes on Benny and yes, it is love at first sight. She also meets Johnny (Tom Hardy), the leader of the gang who assures her nothing will happen to her. Before all is said and done, she hops on the back of Benny’s bike and is on the road, the entire club surrounding them on their bikes. 

She also introduces us to the rest of the club’s membership: Brucie (Damon Herriman), Johnny’s right hand man; Cockroach (Emory Cohen); Cal (Boyd Holbrook); and Zipco (played by Nichols’ regular Michael Shannon), a man who hates pinkos and who was denied the chance to fight in Vietnam because he was too unhinged. Shannon and Herriman are the only supporting actors who are given more to do with their roles although at times I felt that the film’s pacing and sheer lack of focus took away from Shannon’s quietly demented performance.

A sort of weird triangle grows out of Kathy’s and Johnny’s relationship with Benny, each trying to claim dominance over this freewheeling figure. Call it Jules et Jim on wheels. But whatever tension, whatever weird entanglements may have come out from this potential ménage-à-trois is set aside in favor of the repetitive nature of this club’s activities which are limited to picnics where they get drunk and beat each other up while their wives watch, or talking shop while taking care of their bikes. It’s a monotonous lifestyle indeed, a portrayal which was not appreciated by the bikers who attended the press/word of mouth screening where I saw the film (a small scattering of applause came from behind me at the end of the screening while the five or more rows full of bikers in front of me was silent).

Inspired by Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones to form the club, Johnny wants Benny to take over its leadership. Kathy, of course, is against it. But that fight for control has no oomph to it…and neither does her relationship with Benny. There is in fact a veritable lack of chemistry between Comer and Austin. To make matters worse, Nichols hardly explores what their family life as a couple is like. We are also told that Johnny is the only family man in the group but we hardly ever see his family and much more rarely see the toll his absences and devotion to his club may be taking on them. 

Besides a lack of narrative focus, The Bikeriders doesn’t have a clear grasp of what makes its characters tick outside of living free of any responsibilities. I found myself so uninvolved and so interested in these characters that, by the time things take a turn for the worse with the arrival of a new, more violent, generation of bikers in the form of Vietnam veterans and young hoodlums from broken families, I really didn’t care much for what would happen to the club’s original members and even its founder. 

And then there are those accents. Holy Mother of Jesus H. Christ, those accents! They lack as much authenticity as the Ohio towns Nichols chose to shoot his film in instead of Chicago. Comer’s may be the most ludicrous but Hardy’s, a master when it comes to creating specific speech patterns for his characters that dig deep at their psyche, is the most flat. At times, he apes Marlon Brando’s mumbly dialogue delivery and at others he gives up any and all pretense of sounding like a Midwesterner. Even so he is, alongside Shannon, by far the most interesting performer in the film. He injects a quiet, commanding presence to Johnny, a man who lives by a strict set of rules and who knows how to measure his actions and his words.

Nichols’ biggest mistake, without a doubt, is his decision to use the interviews with Kathy, in three different timeframes, as the structure to hang his story. The interviews drain the film of whatever momentum it could have had. It also stops Nichols from going deep into this world, into his male characters, into their family dynamics. It, in fact, silences the women in these men’s lives. If he thought that by bringing in an outsider’s voice would give us a deeper understanding of this subculture…well, he thought wrong. And that is, in the end, the most frustrating thing about The Bikeriders: all the elements for a compelling story are all there. They just don’t quite come together as they should have.