Year: 2023
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Crime, Drama
Director/Screenwriter: Jeff Nichols
Music: David Wingo
Cinematography: Adam Stone
Editor: Julie Monroe
Cast:
Jodie Comer
Austin Butler
Tom Hardy
Damon Herriman
Michael Shannon
Beau Knapp
Karl Glusman
Emory Cohen
Mike Faist
Boyd Holbrook
Toby Wallace
Norman Reedus
Phuong Kubacki
Happy Anderson
Paul Sparks
Will Oldham
Paul Dillon
Rating: 7.4/10
Inspired by Danny Lyon’s eponymous photo-book, a study of outlaw motorcyclists in the American Midwest from 1963 to 1967, THE BIKERIDERS, Jeff Nichols’s sixth feature film, fabulates the vicissitudes of a fictional Chicago-based motorcycle club named Vandals.
The Vandals MC is founded by Johnny Davis (Hardy), a family man with a decent job, who has adequate cunning to consolidate his leadership and facilitates the club to go from strength to strength (establishing several chapters). Among his followers (the metamorphosis of Emory Cohen is astounding, what has happened to him since his memorable turn in John Crowley’s 2015 Oscar-nominated BROOKLYN?), Johnny is particularly taken by Benny Cross (Butler), a young, loyal, devil-may-care biker whose nihilistic attitude also appeals to Kathy (Comer). Impressed by his wordless way to court her and impel her current boyfriend to scram, she marries Benny five weeks later.
That said, it is the strangely homoerotic attraction between an alpha like Johnny and a sigma like Benny – in a scene of two shots where Johnny tries to sway Benny to accept the role as his successor, their closeness overtly transgresses the usual heteronormative boundaries. It is almost palpable that Johnny has the hots for Benny and the latter clearly knows it, and Nichols intentionally prolongs the scenes to let that sink in – others the film from its ilks in the biker sub-genre. While it is not an explicit queer film, THE BIKERIDERS still can be exalted as subversively mould-breaking for its tactful handling.
Generally speaking, female characters have not much leverage in a biker movie and to defy that, Nichols’s script chooses the standpoint of Kathy as the leitmotif. The entire film is recounted through Kathy’s own words, who is interviewed by Danny himself (Faist). Her outsider identity is often seen as a disruptor of the gang’s homosocial environment, of Benny and Johnny’s bond. Comer, fluent in a shrill midwestern accent, can assuredly turn head even if her Kathy is pigeonholed as a traditional wifey role whose interiority is anything but stimulating.
Johnny’s gang is not a bunch of law breakers and fun seekers. Told through the draft board experience of Zipco (Shannon, intoning his monologue with a resounding sobriety), they are a brigade of “undesirable” ones, pulled by a kindred passion and huddled together to form a community, a family. That is one main reason why THE BIKERIDERS is neither keen on showing off the fancy bikes nor the display of impressive motorcades. It plumbs the depth of a particularly masculine loneliness, disillusion and rejection that is the life line of the biker culture. On account of Hardy’s deceptively logy, genuinely deeply felt performance, Johnny is enlivened to be the heart and soul of the picture, a more sympathetic and all-around specimen who can humble Butler to a mere attitudinizer. After Johnny’s exit, it is the end of a halcyon era. The Vandals is degraded to an organized crime organization (friendship is overthrown by power-grabbing and Toby Wallace is a truly terrific menace), Benny cries for the first time and quits biking once and for all (which can only explained by the import of Johnny in his life and Benny’s guilt that he weren’t there when Johnny needs him the most).
Maximally dialing down the macho and boisterous quotients, THE BIKERIDERS is Nichols’s revisionist take on the biker zeitgeist, a retro-reflective reimagining of the masculine connections. And reckoning with the film’s outstanding production and emotional values, can we all agree on that Nichols has attained the status as a full-fledged major filmmaker operating on the US soils? It is a big yes for my money.
referential entries: Jeff Nichols’s TAKE SHELTER (2011, 8.6/10), MIDNIGHT SPECIAL (2016, 6.9/10).
Cinema Omnivore 