The Bikeriders: A Rambling Road Odyssey
Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer, and Austin Butler star in a film that offers an interesting test case: if one aspect of a movie is way above average, does it make up for the parts that are subpar? Specifically, if the performances are phenomenal across the board, is it okay if there’s no plot? Or not much of one?
Bikers in action
The film is an immersion in the life and times of the fictional Vandals, a Chicago motorcycle gang that evolves over the course of the 1960s from a working-class racing club to a criminal outfit involved in drug-running, extortion, and murder. The film is based on a 1968 photo book of the same title by the celebrated New Journalism photographer Danny Lyon, who lived with the Chicago Outlaws for several years and documented their lives around the same time that Hunter S. Thompson was writing his nonfiction book on California’s Hell’s Angels.
“The Bikeriders” is an immersion in the life and times of the fictional Vandals, a Chicago motorcycle gang that evolves over the course of the 1960s from a working-class racing club to a criminal outfit involved in drug-running, extortion, and murder.
The film’s main characters are Johnny (Tom Hardy), the club’s president and alpha dog; Benny (Austin Butler), a silent hog-riding heartthrob; and Kathy (Jodie Comer), the neighborhood girl who takes one look at Benny and is gone, baby, gone. There are other, lesser characters who make impressions: Brucie (Damon Herriman), Johnny’s sensible, capable lieutenant who’ll never be anything more; Cal (Boyd Holbrook), the gang’s chief gearhead; Cockroach (Emory Cohen), named after the bugs he eats for the sheer pleasure of freaking other people out. Then there’s Zipco, a crazy-eyed, beer-swilling, conspiracy-spewing gorilla played by the estimable Michael Shannon.
Tom Hardy as Johnny
To put it simply, that ambition is to make the “Goodfellas” of biker movies — less a tight narrative of A to B to C than a portrait of a milieu and its unwinding. In “The Bikeriders,” the gang gets started after Johnny sees Marlon Brando on TV in the seminal 1953 biker movie “The Wild One” and decides he wants to do that — or, rather, be that.
Johnny bestrides the film like a king whose crown grows increasingly heavy; he’s a cool head who only acts hot as a way of asserting his dominance.
What Comer is up to is related but different. The actress arrived on the half-shell of TV’s “Killing Eve” as the brilliant psychopath Villanelle, and she has a spooky, wide-eyed presence that hides a mind like a box of knives. Kathy serves as our narrator in “The Bikeriders,” ostensibly telling the story to Danny Lyon a few years after it’s all gone down, and as the only three-dimensional female character in the entire movie, she has to fight for the space to be recognized in a ritualistic macho world.
Jodie Comer as Kathy
Butler’s Benny is the Johnny Angel of this group — the strong, silent one who is what all the other bikers want to be. That includes Hardy’s Johnny, and Nichols and his actors have great sport tiptoeing around the line of homoeroticism between the two men. Against Hardy and Comer acting their blessed hearts out, Butler maintains a pure and magical presence, and while the movie never sugarcoats Benny’s dimness, it finds a kind of Zen grandeur in the character’s unwilled perfection.
Around these three boils a cauldron of testosterone and violence, and “The Bikeriders” skips from incident to incident without building much steam. There’s a funny, bloody dust-up between the Vandals and a rival gang that falls apart in exhaustion and shared beers, and a tense standoff in a bar that ends sadly for the unlucky proprietor.
Bikers in action
Adam Stone’s cinematography is rich and atmospheric, golden with the dust kicked up by spinning wheels, and when Lyon’s original photos are shown at the end, it’s not hard to acknowledge that the director has done right by them. The same goes for the terrific soundtrack of period garage rock, doo-wop, R&B, and crazed girl-group classics. All that’s missing, really, is a story. “The Bikeriders” is almost good enough to convince us we don’t need one.
