Film Review: ‘The Bikeriders’ and roleplay versus reality

At the beginning of “The Bikeriders,” there’s a shot of Benny (Austin Butler) sitting in a bar. It’s a quintessential sort of antihero shot – he’s framed from behind under the dirty bar lights, cigarette, beer and whiskey in hand. He’s got a leather motorcycle jacket on, and his hair is greased to oily perfection. The camera slowly pushes in on him, giving him an air of importance. Then two men approach. “You can’t have those colors on in here,” one of them says.

The man is talking about Benny’s club jacket, representing the Chicago motorcycle club he calls family, the Vandals. Benny rather dramatically responds to this by saying: “You’d have to kill me to get this jacket off.” The men take him up on this challenge, and a bloody fight ensues. Right as Benny is about to take a shovel to the back of the head, the frame freezes. Kathy (Jodie Comer), Benny’s wife, cuts in to explain to the audience what’s going on.

It’s a bit jarring, cutting from the crude bluntness of the bar fight to Kathy’s impossibly thick Midwestern accent. But this dichotomy is what Jeff Nichols’ “The Bikeriders” is all about. Being in the Vandals is not about authenticity, at least not when it comes to anything outside of the friendships that form. It’s about image making. The leather, the tattoos, the slicked back hair – it’s all a performance. And Kathy interrupting Benny’s fight with her very own, “I bet you’re wondering how we got here” moment only drives home that point. “The Bikeriders” functions best as a broad allegory for a loss of innocence of sorts, pitting the romanticized version of a thing against its brutal reality. Where the film runs into issues, however, is that the characters living out the fantasy don’t feel fully formed.

From this opening sequence, the film takes us back to the beginning. “The Bikeriders” is based on a photography book by Danny Lyon, in which he depicts the lives of a 1960s motorcycle club called the Outlaws. The film unfolds through a series of interviews and vignettes, taking the audience from the club’s humble beginnings through its evolution into an actual criminal organization – an image the club may have projected in the past, but not one they could meaningfully live up to.

The leader of the Vandals, Johnny (Tom Hardy), is not a hardened criminal. He’s not a lone wolf, or a man with nowhere to turn. He’s actually a truck driver with a couple of kids and a wife, who came up with the idea to start a biking club while watching 1953’s “The Wild One” starring Marlon Brando. He fancies himself a leader, and pushes the family aspect of the club for outcasts who have nowhere else to turn. These guys aren’t saints, and many of them have a bit of a violent streak – but Johnny has a quiet charisma that takes hold over the group. When Kathy first finds her way into the biker bar, she’s overwhelmed by the sheer maleness of the place, disgusted by the leers and gropes she gets as she walks past. But when Johnny promises her nothing untoward will happen to her, you believe him. He holds sway over these guys – he’s given them a place where outcasts can be family.

But while the Vandals might be a mostly harmless group of outsiders, they need to project a certain image to those who might challenge them. The problem, then, comes when the men cosplaying as the hardest, meanest guys in town come into conflict with broken, violent young men with nothing to lose. As the years wear on, the image becomes more difficult to maintain, the constructed rules that Johnny has created for the group more difficult to uphold. The purity of the Vandals’ experience is disrupted forever when a young kid (Toby Wallace) shows up, looking to escape from his violent home through violence of his own. What happens when he realizes that these men he idolizes are not like him in the slightest?

What happens when the line between fantasy and reality is blurred, what happens when the community you’ve carefully cultivated starts to slip from your grasp, is the most interesting concept in “The Bikeriders.” But when Nichols attempts to go deeper, to delve into the relationships and psyches of characters who are mostly pretending to be something they’re not, he finds himself backed against the wall. As Benny, Butler is shot and lit like a movie star (and commands the screen like one as well) but rarely has anything to do beyond serve as a vessel for others’ desires – and the characters doing the desiring are surface level at best.  There’s a singular focus on the push and pull between Kathy and Johnny over Benny, but for that tension to pop on the screen, the characters need to be more compelling than they are.

As Johnny, Hardy’s faux Brando persona doesn’t lend any depth to whatever it is he feels for Benny. Comer gets the closest to finding something interesting to work with, and her over the top midwestern affectation contrasts with her command and stillness in a way that best captures the dichotomy of the film as a whole, the tension between roleplay and authenticity. But as the movie progresses, she has less and less to do – the movie’s ambitions leaving its characters in the dust.

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