The Bikeriders

Director: Jeff Niccols

7 June 2024

See

Kathy (Jodie Kromer) meets Benny (Austin Butler), but this girl meets boy in a biker bar, as he’s a Vandals motorcycle club member, under the wing of president Johnny (Tom Hardy) who looks to him as a protege to succeed him.

Think

The structure is the most interesting part of this film, as well as the fact that Niccols has directed some unexpectedly touching movies like Mud and Take Shelter. It’s organised around interviews that Danny (Mike Faist) is conducting in the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s with Vandals MC members in the style of Hunter S Thompson’s Hells Angels. Except Danny Lyon was a photographer and his insights are more aesthetic than Thompson’s gonzo journalism. Danny’s interviews with Zipco (Michael Shannon), Cal (Boyd Holbrook) and Cockroach (Emory Cohen) as well as book ended by Kathy were the best part.

Feel

It’s true that the Vandals MC look good. At the start. The way Austin Butler smolders over the pool table. Rides his motorbike in a getaway from police only to run out of petrol. Been there. The no gas in the tank part. At the outset the Vandals of the 60s are shown as social outcasts forming their own community, and that subculture is compelling to learn about and peer into. Until the scenes where Kathy is expressing her distress at the way of life being all consuming, and how she she almost gets pulled into a room to be gang raped was sickening. That’s when the switch in perspective is crystal clear. Johnny is struggling to control the direction of the expanding club that becomes outlaw and a gang. Now when I see motorcycle gangs I don’t want to ride with them. If I ever did.