Director Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders is about more than motorcycle gangs. It’s also about how myths can spin violently out of control. NB: The following contains one or two spoilers for The Bikeriders. Stories are seldom truly about the obvious subject splashed all over the poster and marketing. Rocky’s a boxing movie, but more crucially ... The Bikeriders | A powerful drama about the making of a monster
Director Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders is about more than motorcycle gangs. It’s also about how myths can spin violently out of control.
NB: The following contains one or two spoilers for The Bikeriders.
Stories are seldom truly about the obvious subject splashed all over the poster and marketing. Rocky’s a boxing movie, but more crucially it’s about a man finding purpose and self respect. Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders is ostensibly about members of a grungy motorcycle club, but it’s far more than that.
At heart, it’s about myth-making, and the consequences that can occur when those myths curdle into something toxic.
Or, to put it another way: it’s about the making of a monster.
The Bikeriders is unusual in its storytelling approach; it moves from character to character like a relay race, and only gradually reveals the true focus of its interest. The jumping off point is, essentially, a college project that becomes a book, but here serves as a kind of framing device: real-life photographer Danny Lyon, still a student, begins following around a biker gang, taking pictures, recording interviews, and generally embedding himself in their wild lifestyle.
Lyon, played by Mike Faist, barely figures in the narrative itself, though. Instead, he’s there to document the experiences of one Kathy Cross (Jodie Comer), who in 1965 was an ordinary, working class young woman living in Chicago. Kathy plods through a humdrum existence – she has a husband and a house, neither in a great state of repair – until she meets a friend at a biker bar, where she’s initially repulsed by all these greasy, sweaty men dressed in leather and denim.
Kathy’s immediately bewitched, however, by the James Dean-like presence of handsome biker Benny (Austin Butler, in full movie star mode). Within minutes, she’s shifted from revulsion at this bar full of losers to riding on the back of Benny’s motorcycle; that the seat of her once ice-white trousers are now covered in sooty black handprints is both a sign of her shift in perspective, and a foreshadowing of trouble to come.
Read more: The Bikeriders review | Jeff Nichols his the road
Benny and Kathy’s first meeting serves as our entrypoint to the strange and seductive world of the Vandals Motorcycle Club, which has its own uniform and strange customs and rules. Its founder and mastermind is a chap named Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), who emerges as an unlikely figurehead: like Kathy, he previously led the sort of life that would have been dismissed as ‘square’ by his peers: workaday job, wife, kids, his own house.
Sitting at home one evening, however, he happened to watch 1953’s The Wild One, and was struck by his near-namesake, Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando), leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. Taking Brando as his template, Johnny decided to set up the Vandals, installing himself as its unimpeachable leader. Challenges to his authority are brutally beaten down (“Fists or knives,” being one of Johnny’s catchphrases). When Benny’s attacked in a bar for refusing to take off his jacket, Johnny’s retribution is swift and equally violent.
By this stage, The Bikeriders has established a kind of love quadrangle. Kathy loves Benny and wants him to give up the increasingly dangerous Vulture lifestyle. Benny and Johnny are profoundly loyal to one another in a way that occasionally borders on its own romance; when it looks as though a fight’s about to kick off between Johnny and another biker gang, Benny swoops in and launches a pre-emptive attack before anyone else can so much as throw a punch.
Read more: Jeff Nichols’ 20-year road to The Bikeriders
Then there’s Benny and Johnny’s mutual love of the counter-cultural biker world. There’s a certain amount of self-mythologising going on here, with the members of Johnny’s gang (colourfully played by the likes of Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon and Boyd Holbrook) swaggering around in their scruffy jackets, drinking and partying. There’s a sneaking suspicion that Johnny, in particular, is merely acting out a part he’s created for himself; theirs is a constructed reality in which they play at being tough gangsters and outlaws, but it’s all really an excuse to sit around campfires and get drunk.
(Unlike, say, Easy Rider, the Vandals never seem to stray too far from home; while the members clearly love their bikes, they spend more time talking about their steeds than sitting on them.)
Gradually, however, we see this world that Johnny has created – almost as a hobby – spin out of his control. New chapters form elsewhere across the US. Disadvantaged kids see the Vultures riding around on their bikes and, like Johnny earlier in the film, are instantly smitten by their cool outfits and screw-you attitude. The parties, which were always volatile affairs, are now even more dark and nasty – as Kathy eventually discovers.
By the early 1970s, there’s a new generation of members who take the Vulture way of life far more seriously than its original crew. No longer young men, bikers like Benny and Cockroach (Emory Cohen) have either grown weary of all the violence and deaths, or are simply exhausted by playing a part that no longer fits them. Cockroach, who was a family man from the beginning, has finally decided he wants to settle down and become a motorcycle cop.
Podcast: The Bikeriders, with writer/director Jeff Nichols
Those younger bikers, as represented by Toby Wallace’s The Kid, have begun to turn the Vultures from an impersonation of a criminal gang to the real deal – prostitution, gun running, summary executions. Johnny and his cohorts, now in their middle years, no longer even ride bikes – they’ve taken to travelling around in stodgy saloon cars instead.
Among an ensemble cast, and a saga that spans almost a decade, it’s Tom Hardy’s Johnny who emerges as the story’s hub and its cautionary centre. The Bikeriders is about an ordinary guy who wanted to make himself extra-ordinary – a larger-than-life figure, like Marlon Brando’s Johnny. (Ironically, the Brando character, and his motorcycle club, were themselves a myth – the subject of tabloid stories about biker clubs that were transformed into a short story by author Frank Rooney, then filtered again through the lens of a Hollywood movie.)
In founding the Vultures, Johnny creates what amounts to a pre-internet version of a meme: an image, a way of existing, that is copied and copied, and becomes more twisted and dangerous the more it spreads. It’s not dissimilar to the way the underground boxing group in Fight Club slowly morphed into a terrorist organisation in Fight Club. Or, to point to a real-world example, right-wing populism spread from small groups on grim bulletin board sites to mainstream politics.
Superbly performed by Tom Hardy, Johnny emerges as The Bikeriders’ puppetmaster, or perhaps a spin on Doctor Frankenstein: a charismatic, even monstrous figure ultimately destroyed by his own creation.
