The Bikeriders

In his best film since Mud, Jeff Nichols adapts Danny Lyon's 1968 photography book depicting the lives of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club to create this odd group-character-study centered on the fictional Vandals Motorcycle Club. Lyon traveled the American Midwest with bikers from 1963 to 1967, learning about, sharing, recording, and glorifying their distinctive lifestyle. Nichols' film is a more critical look back at the biker clubs of that era, but it's still pretty glorious without exactly crossing over to glamorizing. "Fetishizing" is a better term for what this movie engages in. Like almost every filmmaker who has trained their lens on guys in leather jackets astride their loud, shiny two-wheel machines, Nichols evokes the freedom and independence these images promise, but his narrative depicts the culture almost as if it were a prison.

The picture comes off like Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery's debut feature, The Loveless, if that film had been played for comedy. The three leads are spellbinding. Tom Hardy (Bronson, The Dark Knight Rises, Mad Max: Fury Road) plays the biker club's founder, Johnny Davis; Austin Butler (Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, Elvis, Dune: Part Two) plays Johnny's quasi-lieutenant or dimwitted consiglieri, Benny Cross, a hothead of very few words; and Jodie Comer (Free Guy, The Last Duel, and lots of British TV)) plays Kathy Bauer, Benny's motormouth wife who relays stories of her life with the bikers to Danny Lyon, whose played by Mike Faist (West Side Story, Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, and Challengers). This is a movie crammed with tropes I usually dislike, including wall-to-wall explanatory narration, a journalist character who isn't really a character, and simplistic nostalgia for "the good old days," yet the actors are so mesmerizing not only does none of that matter, it all feels entirely appropriate. Similarly, Adam Stone's 35mm cinematography succeeds at rendering something simultaneously beautiful and ugly, which is exactly what it's called for here.

I had a huge grin on my face throughout this entire picture. I could listen all day to the brazenly affected midwestern dialects of the three leads while gawking at them and their phenomenal supporting cast headed up by Nichols' regular Michael Shannon. Trying to anticipate how each character would react to every given situation in the story is the most entertained I've been at the movies so far this year—and that's not meant as a backhanded compliment. The ending of the film should resonate with anyone past the age of forty who has ever been part of an organization that seemed glorious at an earlier time but is now heavily compromised, which probably includes all Americans and certainly includes all cineasts.