The Bikeriders

As a dad in the 40s who recently moved to the Midwest it’s nice to know that there is still time to start a motorcycle gang.

The Bikeriders is a surprisingly tender slice of life film and an update both on all those b movie motorcycle flicks from the 60s.

It’s based on book by Danny Lyons who photographed and interviewed the group in the late 60s and 70s.

Tom Hardy plays a dad who starts a motorcycle club cause he wants to hang out with some guys. Jodie Comer plays the nice girl who falls in love with a bad boy and Austin Butler gets the rebel role usually associated with the late James Dean. The essential tension in the movie is not the rise and fall of a biker gang (although that’s there) but who Butler loves more Comer’s Kathy or Hardy’s Johnny.

The movie is based on a real life club but the names are likely changed to protect the innocent. Here they are called The Vandals.

I don’t claim to know how true any of the story is but it has the aura of truth behind it simply because the movie resists every urge to have standard Hollywood plot.

There are some crimes, sure, but it’s low key part of their lives (until it isn’t). Which means this isn’t a Scorsese gangland epic even though it probably could have been.

Instead, it’s a character study, a drama and a bit of a comedy as a group of guys with day jobs who decided they wanted to live like they walked out of a Marlon Brando movie.

In real life they’re mostly losers who find something to cling to in each other and the rules they come up with to make the club function.

Michael Shannon does excellent work (as always) with some speeches to explain their loserdom. Also, I’m pretty sure at one point I could smell just how dirty and drunk Shannon’s Zico must have been in real life.

The movie goes out of its way to point out how innocent the early years of the club are. At one point after a gnarly fight two gangs hang out and have beers together. Other incidents like this I will leave for you to discover.

But the golden years end mostly how you would expect with the club moving far beyond even the wild lives they had made for themselves just a few years earlier.

Hardy and Comer carry the thing as the dad who gets in over his head and the woman who shoulders the exposition while also getting a chance to explain some things with just a smile and a nod.

Butler, as I said earlier, is doing a James Dean thing and he somehow makes that work. A simpler movie would have given Butler a revenge moment near the end but he does something else.

And when it happens it’s a bit of both great filmmaking and acting. I imagine there was a temptation, especially here, to turn this into more of a crime film, or an action film or something else.

Instead, Writer/Director Jeff Nichols makes the right call.

Ok, there’s one bit else I want to say but it’s super spoilery so please stop now if you don’t want to know how it ends.

So the final bit is Comer and Butler having left the gang and living in Florida. And Comer goes to the window to see her rebel now completely domesticated and working a normal job. He looks up and smiles at her.

And she smiles back.

The look of a woman who’s victory is now complete.