'The Bikeriders' Should Be Called 'Boogie Bikes'
Writer/director Jeff Nichols takes his stab at making a 'Goodfellas.'
As far as movies that desperately want to be the next Goodfellas go, The Bikeriders is nowhere near as good as Boogie Nights or Trainspotting, but much better than Blow, Lord of War, or American Made. I say this, by the way, as someone who generally finds motorcycles irritating (GET A GODDAMN MUFFLER YOU OBNOXIOUS ATTENTION HOG) and has not, to date, enjoyed the work of writer/director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Midnight Special). But I enjoyed the heck out of about 75% of the movie, which ain’t too shabby.
The Bikeriders is inspired by a Danny Lyon book of the same name, which combines photographs and interviews with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club members in the 1960s. Although a version of Lyon appears in the movie (played by Mike Faist from Challengers), the Outlaws have been turned into a fictionalized crew, the Vandals (not to be confused with the punk band, obviously). Johnny (Tom Hardy, once again in full silly-voice mode), a truck driver and happily married father of two, is inspired to start the Vandals after watching Marlon Brando’s famous “What have you got?” moment from The Wild Ones. He surrounds himself with various eccentric, hard-partying misfits, all portrayed by recognizable faces, including Michael Shannon, Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus, Damon Herriman, Emory Cohen, Beau Knapp, and Karl Glusman. The Vandals begin to expand, launching chapters in other parts of the Midwest; in the ensuing decade, they grow wild beyond Johnny’s ability to manage them, gradually evolving into something malicious.
Caught in the middle of all of this is Johnny’s chosen heir, Benny (Dune: Part Two’s Austin Butler), an especially rebellious, unusually pretty member of the club. Benny has big James Dean vibes, and understandably catches the eye of Kathy (Jodie Comer), who is otherwise decidedly biker-unfriendly. They get married after just a few weeks of dating; the majority of the narrative is conveyed by Kathy to Lyon via flashbacks, effectively making her the audience surrogate.
The Bikeriders doesn’t have a plot per se; like all of the aforementioned pictures, it’s a rise-and-fall story, where the first half presents a romanticized, high-energy vision of a niche, generally seedy subculture (e.g., the mafia, heroin addicts, members of the adult film industry, etc.), and then the second half pulls the rug out, demonstrating that all the “fun” the characters previously enjoyed has severe consequences.
The first half of The Bikeriders certainly has flaws: there’s no discernible reason for Kathy to love Benny other than that he’s hot, and as great as the supporting cast is, most of them don’t get very much to do (unsurprisingly, Shannon is the standout, although Cohen also makes an impression as a supremely affable guy who enjoys eating bugs). But these failings are balanced out by Comer, whose performance is incredible even if her character is underwritten, and by Nichols’ ability to expertly mimic the visual language of Goodfellas (e.g., Scorsese channeling the French New Wave while on coke).
It’s in the second-half descent where Nichols, like Johnny, loses control.
It’s not that Nichols fails to plant the seeds of his characters’ ultimate downfall. It’s that Nichols refuses to acknowledge those seeds, treating the Vandals’ deterioration as a true tragedy that might have been avoided.
Throughout the back half of the movie, there’s a truly ridiculous amount of dialogue about “these young guys” - i.e., newer members of the club - who are all total animals. They’re also distinguished as “drug users,” in contrast to “drinkers,” although what drugs they’re using aren’t entirely clear (we see exactly one guy shooting heroin, but we’re mostly just shown people smoking joints, which the older club members also do). The message, hammered home again and again and again, is that these second-generation Vandals are purely responsible for the club’s metamorphosis into a violent organized crime outfit1.
This may be true… but no one ever even stops to consider that the Vandals were always savage hooligans, prone to beating the shit out of anyone who crosses them and, sometimes, each other. When Benny gets jumped by some guys in a bar, Johnny and the Vandals don’t just put those guys in the hospital, they burn down the entire bar, punishing its owner and clientele for not intervening on Benny’s behalf. That they eventually attract casual murderers is not entirely shocking. Yet Nichols treats it as though it were Tony Montana infiltrating a monastery of Buddhist monks.
There’s always a chance, with films such as this, that the audience will be so enchanted by the “fun” half of the movie that they completely miss the point of the considerably less-fun second half (this happens with Scorsese movies, like, a lot, to such a degree that he’s now basically trying to refute his own work). Most of the time, I’m at a loss as to how this happens. Do people seriously think being a mobster or a heroin addict or an arms dealer is, like, a good thing to be? How do they not see that 50% of the movie is arguing against their subjects?
But I completely get how someone one might walk away from The Bikeriders thinking that Johnny, who in one scene breaks a club member’s fingers for the sake of making a point, is a cool dude. I get the impression that Nichols thinks Johnny is a cool dude.
This may at least partially explain Nichols’ unwillingness to interrogate the relationship between Benny and Kathy in any meaningful way. I said earlier that there’s no reason for Kathy to love Benny, other than that he’s good-looking, but I think it bears repeating, because Benny’s behavior towards Kathy is selfish at best and toxic at worst. This wouldn’t be a problem, if that was part of the point (yet again, I point to Goodfellas), but Nichols only ever treats their relationship like an authentic love story.
All of this makes The Bikeriders feel more than a little bit like a celebration of unchecked testosterone. Kathy - the film’s sole female character with more than two lines of dialogue - is defined purely by her relationship with Benny, even after she suffers a truly harrowing trauma. The Bikeriders ends on a sentimental note, wistful for the good old days, oddly incurious about how we wound up where we are today.
These newer members are also part of the film’s odd messaging regarding the Vietnam War. Shannon’s character gets a monologue about how he wanted to go to ‘Nam, but the military rejected him; in fact, he specifically complains about how they wouldn’t take him even though so many other young men didn’t want to go. Later, we’re told that a lot of these insidious “young guys” did serve in Vietnam. So the idea is… what? That Shannon’s character lucked out? That America would have been better off sending guys like Shannon? That everyone who served in Vietnam came home a villain? I can’t figure it out.