A nostalgic and thrilling ride through an era of American history.
In 1953, a young Marlon Brando donned a leather jacket and a motorcycle cap and hopped onto a Triumph Thunderbird 6T in The Wild One. With that slick gesture, the biker movie subgenre was born. Movies like The Wild Angels and Easy Rider followed in the ’60s, capturing different facets of a fascinating and sometimes dangerous subculture. Biker movies have gradually fallen out of favour in the ensuing decades, but writer-director Jeff Nichols takes us back to those heady days in the historical crime drama, The Bikeriders.
The story is framed by interviews that photojournalist Danny Lyon (Mike Faist) conducts with Kathy (Jodie Comer). She is married to Benny (Austin Butler), a member of the Chicago-based Vandals Motorcycle Club, who is impulsive and prone to violent outbursts. Kathy recounts how the Vandals evolved from 1965 to 1975, beginning as a small club started by Johnny (Tom Hardy), who was inspired by watching The Wild One on TV. She finds herself caught up in the Vandals’ conflicts, especially between newer and older members. What was once an innocent special-interest group morphs into a criminal organisation; Kathy reckons with what the Vandals have become, and Benny must choose between his devotion to his wife and his allegiance to the club.
The Bikeriders is based on the 1968 photobook of the same name by the real-life Lyon. From 1963 to 1967, he documented the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, the basis for the Vandals in the movie, via photographs and audio interviews.
“I immediately thought it had the ingredients for a great film,” Nichols tells Picturehouse about the book, which he first encountered in 2003.
“It was like walking into a room, and there’s no Christmas tree, but all the ornaments are laid out on the floor in front of you,” Nichols explains. “So, it’s your job to build the tree — though you can see all these beautiful things that are going to be a part of it. But it took a while to figure out how to build that structure to hang all those ornaments.”
Lyon’s interviews with Kathy, which Nichols found to be the most compelling, formed that ‘tree’, with the character becoming the audience’s gateway into the biker gang subculture.
“I don’t want her just to be an observer; I want her to be a participant … she’s in it. And ultimately, what she ends up representing is really the tension of the whole thing, which is this tension in masculinity,” Nichols says. Through Kathy, The Bikeriders examines themes of community and brotherhood, illuminating both the positive and negative aspects of a person’s search for belonging.
“The interesting thing about Kathy is that she’s a Vandal through her marriage to Benny — she’s not from this world [but] she’s catapulted into it,” Comer tells Glamour. “And because she’s a woman, she is able to see things from a different perspective.”
An indelible aspect of Comer’s performance is Kathy’s distinctive accent, which sounds unusual as it differs from the stereotypical Chicago accent. Comer studied audio recordings of the real Kathy and worked with dialect coach Victoria Hanlin, breaking lines down phonetically to capture her idiolect.
“Kathy’s an amazing storyteller. As soon as you listened to her, you leaned in,” Comer tells Vogue. “I just loved her, and I thought she had such a spirit, and that’s what I wanted to try and capture — her essence.”
In addition to drawing directly from the source material, another element that lends The Bikeriders authenticity is that the actors rode the motorcycles for real during filming.
“Thankfully, the actors were up for it, but our biggest concern was safety,” Nichols tells Forbes. “We had so many meetings about it. It was actually what we spent the majority of our pre-production on,” he adds, saying that after the production took all possible precautions, they “had to accept a certain amount of danger”.
Despite — or perhaps partially because of — the danger, Butler enjoyed the experience of riding both the 1965 and 1966 Harley Davidson Electra Glides. “My biggest problem was I had to remind myself to not smile. I was just enjoying myself so much,” Butler tells The AU Review. “It was an exhilarating feeling, you know? Riding this giant pack of motorcycles and being up front with one of my heroes, Tom Hardy, and looking over to him, and we’re riding through a cornfield in Cincinnati. That was so special. I just had to remind myself to keep a cool, serious look on my face.”
Elevated by engaging performances from some of Hollywood’s most promising rising stars, The Bikeriders is an intimate and authentic portrait of a time gone by, an engrossing crime drama that coasts by on its nostalgic charm.
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After a chance encounter, Kathy is drawn to Benny, the newest member of Midwestern motorcycle club. The club begins to evolve, forcing Benny to choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club.
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