Jeff Nichols is one of those directors who may not be a household name, but he’s one of the few working directors out there who I feel is just one box office hit away from breaking out and becoming one of the modern greats. The 2012 film Mud is hands down my favorite from his filmography. Then there is Take Shelter and Midnight Special that are close behind. While these may not be considered box office hits, these films I feel are each cinematic gems that deserve to be checked out. So of course when I hear he is helming The Bikeriders with a stacked cast of Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Michael Shannon (who was also in Midnight Special and Take Shelter), Boyd Holbrook, and Damon Herriman, this easily became one of the films I was most looking forward to this year. As it turns out, this is one of the most frustrating film experiences I’ve sat through in some time.
The film is about the midwest biker culture from 1965-1973, a film that was heavily influenced by Easy Rider but was attempting to have a little more grit, but for me it just never quite felt right. Danny (Mike Faist) was a photographer who hung out with the biker gang that called themselves The Vandals and is interviewing Kathy (Jodie Comer) to get her perspective on the rise of the gang. This interview is basically used as a narration for the film, and gives it this weird Goodfellas vibe, and for me this just didn’t work. First let me say I’m a fan of Jodie Comer, and I feel she is one of the great rising stars working right now, but the accent she was using for this role had me wanting to jam needles in my ears, I literally had to stop the film at one point just to walk away for a bit. It may have been authentic to the character, but yikes, it was like Fargo on steroids and a helium balloon. Anyway, Kathy is our introduction to the gang, and we meet everyone through her perspective, and we see her relationship develop with Benny (Austin Butler). He’s the pretty boy of the group and does a good job of playing a tough-guy version of James Dean. Leading the gang is Johnny (Tom Hardy), who plays this role effortlessly it seems, and just has this essence of cool so that it’s no surprise why these other bikers want to follow him and be like him.
My biggest problem with this film is that we have Kathy as our narrator, a true outsider looking in, because it seems this film wants to be about this brotherhood on bikes, but we are constantly listening to her talking about how much she didn’t want him in the gang. The relationship with Benny and Kathy as an audience we never get to connect with, because we never get anything resembling depth. If anything, the bromance with Benny and Johnny feels more authentic. We actually get to see how the two depend on one another, but then there’s the third act where the film just kind of lost me and it seemed to become a whole other movie altogether. Part of me wonders if there is just a lot of cut footage out there that pieces this together better, because this film just feels incomplete in a lot of ways.
With that being said, the performances in this film are great. Michael Shannon and Damon Harriman gave some standout performances in supporting roles. While I doubt they’ll get awards attention, they still left an impression on me. Butler is the one who really elevates himself here. He does a good job of stepping away from his role as Elvis and here takes on this presence of the mythic persona of what a biker was supposed to be in the 60s, basically a true rebel who didn’t seem to belong anywhere.
The film does a decent job of showing us the transition as the biker gang got bigger and how this fun gang of misfits devolved into a gang of drug addicts and hardened criminals. Even as we see this transition, I feel the film plays it too safe, and when some of the bikers start to go bad, we only get a glimpse of this. There is a moment in the film where things could have gone really bad, but it is stopped at the last moment … Here’s the thing … the bad thing should have happened; it didn’t need to be on camera, but it would have at least reflected the reality of the horror that was taking place with the gang and how much it had changed from how it began. Playing it safe is what hurts this film the most.
Then there is the cinematography. Some of it looks good, but this was another missed opportunity to really capture the essence of the freedom the gang was after and then show how it was lost. The film is a little too clean; in a perfect world I would have hoped this was shot on Super 16mm to get some grit into these shots, to feel the dirt and oil from these long rides on the blacktop highways.
At the end of the day I’m going to hold out hope that perhaps there is a longer cut of this out there that not only fills in some blanks but also lets this film breathe. Maybe after rewatching the film it may grow on me, but I’m not all too optimistic about that. The best thing to come out of this is that I know Austin Butler will become a star. He has that look and charisma that has been missing from film stars of late.
