Austin Butler in a scene from The Bikeriders.Courtesy of Focus Features/The Associated Press
- The Bikeriders
- Directed by Jeff Nichols
- Written by Jeff Nichols, based on the photojournalism book by Danny Lyon
- Starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler and Tom Hardy
- Classification 14A; 116 minutes
- Opens in theatres June 21
A mash of Goodfellas and Sons of Anarchy for audiences who have long forgotten Martin Scorsese’s gangster masterpiece and who also have absolutely no interest in ever watching the ultra-grisly FX series about an illicit motorcycle club, Jeff Nichols’s new drama The Bikeriders drives an uneasy balance between reverence of and morbid curiosity for its outlaw subjects.
Inspired by Danny Lyon’s 1968 book of immersive photojournalism in which the author embedded himself inside the nascent Outlaws Motorcycle Club of Chicago – following not only its members but their families – Nichols approaches his material from what feels like the opposite end of Lyon’s lens. There is a chilly distance that the director places between his camera and his characters, their hard-scrabble world built on rebellion becoming a cause that the filmmaker neither rallies toward or cares to examine hard enough to reject. It is an anthropological drama that never cracks its subjects open – an approach that might work on paper, but feels beset by engine troubles on-screen.
In interviews, Nichols (Midnight Special, Loving) has openly copped to borrowing many of Scorsese’s Goodfellas stylistic approaches, including framing much of the story as Lorraine Bracco-ish narration from Jodie Comer, here playing Kathy, the put-upon wife of would-be wild one Benny (Austin Butler). Nichols one-ups Scorsese’s approach, though, by having Kathy deliver her narration not directly to moviegoers but to Lyon himself, played here by a scrappy Mike Faist (recently seen sparking all kinds of different masculinity-in-flux fantasies in Challengers). As Lyon gently peppers Kathy with the details of her life, the story of the Vandals motorcycle club (a light fictionalizing of the real-life Outlaws) comes to rough, grinding life.
Damon Herriman, left, and Tom Hardy in The Bikeriders.Courtesy of Focus Features/The Associated Press
Much of Kathy’s memories focus on her ostensibly incendiary romance with Benny, a natural-born rule-breaker who thinks nothing of leading police on a multicounty chase, or getting into a brutal bar fight with local brutes who don’t care for his Vandals affiliation. But because Benny is so deeply moulded from the strong-and-silent generation of tough guys, there isn’t all that much to the character or his relationship with Kathy to explore. Meaning that Kathy, Lyon, and ultimately the audience are riding shotgun to a cipher.
Butler, who has proven that he can toggle easily between playing brooding sex symbols (Elvis) to terrifying sociopaths (Dune: Part Two), pushes Benny as far and as hard as he can. And his naturally smouldering looks do almost go the distance. Yet ultimately Benny is a character who doesn’t so much live his life a quarter-mile at a time as he aimlessly careens through one metaphorical stoplight to the next, no thoughts in his head or ambition in his drive. There is precious little dramatic tension in following a man going nowhere fast, or at least none that Nichols can find and tune. And with Benny a void, then Kathy – whose obsession with him is painted as her entire essence – becomes just as empty.
Which leaves much of the film’s energy coming from both Tom Hardy’s Johnny, the Vandals leader, and his motley crew of neat-lookin’ and -talkin’ fellas, played by a killer lineup of hey-it’s-that-guys. Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus, Damon Herriman and Nichols’s ride-or-die collaborator Michael Shannon all do fine, extra-quirky work as members of the Vandals, each scruffier than the next. Nichols is all too aware of his supporting cast’s outsized magnetism, too, seeming at many points eager to ditch the staid Kathy-Benny drama for more time simply hanging out with the boys.
Hardy is in especially fine whackadoo form, adopting a high-pitched nasally voice that is equal parts Looney Tunes and Al Capone (but also several degrees removed from the time that the actor actually played Al Capone, back in 2020). The gently seductive way that Hardy rolls his tongue around his rather unclassifiable accent – enjoying a kind of studious, committed fun – also makes the strained midwestern American inflection that Comer is attempting that much more of a slack-jawed misfire.
Gentle and terrifying all at once, Hardy’s hog-wild performance is a burst of raging colour in Nichols’s washed-out world. Scorsese might not approve – but Joe Pesci’s Goodfellas side-splitter certainly would.