The Media Tourist

Motorcycle gang roars through the Midwest in gritty drama with ring of ’70s authenticity

The Bikeriders
Starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer & Tom Hardy
Directed by Jeff Nichols
Rated R

In theaters Friday, June 21

“I’ve never felt so out of place in my whole life,” says a doe-eyed young Chicago woman in this tale of rip-roaring greasy riders in the Midwest, recalling her first time being around a bunch of grungy, wild-ass, hog-straddlin’, born-to-be-wild biker-bar dudes.

Since the odds are that you don’t hang with a motorcycle gang, you might feel a bit out of place too, on the outside looking in at this burly subculture of bikes, brawls and broken bones based on a book by Danny Lyons, a gonzo photographer and journalist who rode with Chicago’s Outlaws Motorcycle Club—the oldest in the world, founded in the 1930s—for nearly five years in the 1960s. Lyons’ book, published in 1968, is now considered a bona fide classic of photojournalistic documentation.

The movie revolves around the relationship of brooding bad-boy biker Benny (Elvis’ Austin Butler) and a romantically smitten local gal, Kathy (Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer), as their lives become more entrenched and entangled in a gang called the Vandals, a fictional group but clearly based on the Outlaws. When the club progresses beyond the margins of society into real crime, Kathy wants Benny to leave.

But for biker clubs, loyalty is a big deal. In the opening scene, we watch Benny get a brutal beatdown because he won’t take off his Vandals jacket, his “colors,” in the presence of hostile non-riders. Later, another Vandal member is harshly disciplined when he expresses his plan to leave the group. There’s a code, rules and an unspoken expectation of lifelong fealty. Staying might not be easy, but quitting is even harder.

Motorcycle riders have long been romanticized and iconized as roguish delinquents, freedom-loving rovers and nonconformist brothers of the road, in movies like The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando, the countercultural classic Easy Rider (1969) and even the dopey comedy Wild Hogs (2007).  But in the real world, Chicago’s Outlaws and the California-based Hell’s Angels competed in an escalating competition for biker supremacy and notoriety, leading to a “war” with bombs and guns in Canada. The Bikeriders doesn’t go that far, but it does allude to other clubs and rivalries. With an almost tactile ‘70s aesthetic enhanced by an overlay of deep-cut soundtrack tunes from the era (like Gary U.S. Bonds’ “New Orleans,” the Animals’ “Talkin ‘Bout You” and Johnny Soul’s “Come and Get It”), its depictions of the Vandals’ increasingly dirty work sometimes give it the look and feel of a Goodfellas for gearheads, even down to the closing image.

It’s a scrappy, scruffy world, where baths and dental floss seem to have been long ago replaced by testosterone and booze, and disagreements are settled with fists, knives and guns. The Victors proudly sport the colorful nicknames that fit their personalities and status, like Cockroach, Wahoo, Big Jack and Corky. There’s Tom Hardy as Johnny, the club’s founder and leader, worried about the changes brought by the influx of younger, more volatile members. Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead is Funny Sonny, a hulking hippie biker from California grinning through a mouthful of rotting teeth. And Michael Shannon—who has so far been in every movie ever made by director Jeff Nichols, including Mud, Midnight Special and Loving—is the melancholy Zipco, lamenting how the Army once deemed him too “undesirable” to join.

The Bikeriders shows how a group of weekend dirt-bike off-roaders became a bigger, much more diverse and unruly cult, and ultimately devolved into a violent hierarchy of organized trafficking in drugs, gambling, prostitution and murder. But even outside the law, we see how the Vandals are bound by the ties to their community of like-minded outliers, like when they respectfully show up en masse (and unwanted) to a funeral of one of their own.

It’s ain’t always pretty, but it always feels pretty real—and feels true to the book by Lyons, who’s even a character in this film, interviewing and photographing these white guys on their loud bikes and the women who love them, in bars and pool halls, partying, chilling and brawling. Comer, from Britain, drives much of the movie’s narrative structure (through Kathy’s “flashback” interviews) and does a terrific job nailing a Midwestern accent and the brassy ‘tude of a true-blue Chicagoan. So does Hardy, also from England, who deftly wields all the “deez” and “doze” and “disses” and “dats” as handily as a switchblade. Butler, who most recently played a diabolical, ghostly white villain in Dune Part Two, seems to be distancing himself as far away as possible from the sanctifications of Elvis, this time zooming past stop signs, cops and corn fields on a noisy Harley.

Ready to get your motor runnin’ and head out on the highway? This ruggedly authentic immersion into a boisterous biker-verse of yesteryear might not be everyone’s cup of genteel movie tea. But if you’re curious about life in a rough-and-ready motorcycle club, well, hop on with the Vandals. Just bring your own switchblade—and, oh yeah, a toothbrush and some soap.

—Neil Pond