The Brooklyn Rail

“I don’t know why, but obscenity and motorcycles travel hand in hand.”

So says one of the bikers in Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders with a shrug. In a broad sense, the biker film canon is a veritable paean to this statement, from Roger Corman’s countercultural classic, The Wild Angels (1966) to Francis Ford Coppola’s postmodern pastiche, Rumble Fish (1983). Practically since its inception––or at least since Marlon Brando flexed his leather-clad shoulders and asked “Whaddaya got?” (The Wild One)––this biker outlaw icon has become uniquely inextricable from its status as American cinematic folklore, both shaped by and shaping its own image in terms brute and poetic. As Hunter S. Thompson put it in Hells Angels, bikers are “as uniquely American as jazz … kind of halfbreed anachronism, a human hangover from the era of the Wild West. Yet … as new as television,” taking their inspiration from the Hollywood films that romanticize, villainize, and emulate them in turn.

It’s fitting, then, that Nichols’s new film explores not the lives of bikers per se so much as the contours of this oft-painful cycle of self-fabulation. He channels these ideas through the casually ethnographic lens of Danny Lyon, whose 1968 photo-book The Bikeriders, a classic of New Journalism, was itself created collaboratively with its subjects, the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, adding to this sense of creative flux. Lyon called that book a “personal record,” and through Nichols’s lens, the photos within it are recreated alongside the book’s intimate timbre. Taking a cue from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the film is driven by the constant propulsive rhythm of rockabilly and jukebox classics, coating its surfaces with their warm nostalgia. The end result is a substantial yet surprisingly delicate film made up of chilly fall days and windy nights on the outskirts of towns unknown, populated by characters trying to figure out what their lives mean on the register of the image.

There’s no nudity in The Bikeriders, and not as much violence as one might expect (though there’s plenty). The question of “obscenity” here becomes a spectral, if threatening one, taking on a melancholic resonance as Nichols’s characters, seemingly unconsciously, try to live up to their own ideas of what being a bike rider really means. In the end, the fluid iconic sign to which they all aspire, both on the screen and amongst themselves, will always be just out of reach, its meaning rushing past itself on the highway in a cloud of dust, framed through the lens of a camera or told in retrospect.

In a refreshing change from the genre proper, the story of The Bikeriders is told by a woman, Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer), who falls in love with a member of the Chicago Vandals riding club, in 1965. In a thick Chicago accent, she tells Lyon (Mike Faist) about her life as a part of the group over the course of three interviews, one in 1965, the others in ’69 and ’73. Her brash, incisive narration grounds the story of these act-first-think-later men even more than Lyon’s camera, framing ethnography as hazy, fondly-held recollection, all to the tune of Goodfellas (1990). Nichols’s narrative takes this organic storytelling mode as its guide, jumping across time with each anecdote, leaving comfortable space in between. Through these loose vignettes, the film neatly presents the world of the biker as a fundamental outgrowth of mid-century American social conservatism and forced conformity. Soon, Johnny (Tom Hardy), the gang’s leader (and this film’s Sam the Lion [The Last Picture Show]), is introduced, and his story takes center stage, a self-conscious metaphor for the rise and fall of what Kathy calls “the golden age of the American biker gang.” Yet, the film’s heart is with Kathy’s husband, the man Johnny wishes he could be: Benny (Austin Butler).

With The Bikeriders, Austin Butler once more proves his skill for imbuing new star power into archetypes of twentieth-century American masculinity that have become so iconic over time as to risk flattening, succumbing to what Walter Benjamin called the “decay of the aura.” He earned his adult fame by embodying one of America’s most literally iconic figures, Elvis Presley, and his success there was presented as a quasi-spiritual act of conjuring (recall the constant coverage of his inability to drop Presley’s famous drawl). For all the discussion of the film’s empathetic treatment of Elvis-the-man, though, from another perspective, Butler’s greatest success in that role was to recreate even a small fraction of the obsessive reaction in teenage girls that Elvis-the-icon himself did––repeated viewings of Baz Luhrmann’s nearly-three-hour long film also evoked the ardor Leonardo DiCaprio received in the wake of Titanic.

Here, Butler’s captivating presence and undeniable, James Dean good looks are refracted out again to this end, embodying not a specific character but what Thompson called the “romance-glazed image” of the biker begun by Brando in The Wild One (1953). While many scenes in the film are staged to recreate Lyon’s images, the cinematography works to further imbue Butler’s nearly-wordless Benny with sheer uncut aura, the feeling of larger-than-life iconography that each character is chasing. Johnny founds the Vandals after watching Brando on television, and his affection for Benny is predicated on the younger man’s similarity to this role––his devil-may-care approach to life, his ease, his willingness to brawl, his love of his bike, his freedom. But Benny, like Brando, is a cypher, the same kind of broad romantic icon of nonconformity on display in The Wild One and The Wild Angels (“What are you rebelling against?” and “What is it you want to do?” are not questions Brando or Peter Fonda’s characters are easily able to answer).

In the film’s most emblematic scene, the biker’s appeal as a romantic icon is presented almost as a thesis statement. A young man identified only as “The Kid” (Toby Wallace) walks down an empty main street in the dreary light of an early morning. Suddenly, the group of bikers ride past, music playing in the background. The world stops. The Kid watches, rapt, and the music takes on a dreamy quality as the men on bikes fly past in elegant slow motion. It’s love at first sight. The Kid’s face is filled with naked desire and obsessive concentration––only shattered when a car almost hits the enraptured Kid, who has found himself stopped in his tracks. Here, the biker’s aura, exemplified by Butler’s passive, desirable Benny, is evoked with such lustful reverence it ruptures the film’s diegesis, embodying what Laura Mulvey calls “to-be-looked-at-ness” in her

seminal “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” here shot through with the homoeroticism Anger canonized with Scorpio Rising. If, as Michael Kimmel has argued, “masculinity” itself “is a homosocial enactment” by its very nature, regulated by the looks of other men, the biker in Nichols’s film is a utopic, aspirational masculine subjectivity, a sign capable of being imbued with any number of masculinities depending on the perspective of the masculine viewer.

Tragically, though, this utopian ideal’s blankness, it’s very iconicity––the fact that each other character imbues Benny’s image with his own desires––is the Vandals’s downfall. As competing visions of what it means to be a biker (a family man, a brother, a protector, an outlaw, a criminal, a hero, etc.) come into tension, cracks begin to form in the men’s solidarity with each other. The Bikeriders’ success lies in the elegant and humanistic way it probes those fractures, itself employing the classic structures of twentieth-century American cinematic mythmaking with the curiosity of a photographer framing their subject. The lesson Nichols’s offers through the character behind Benny’s facade, though, is straight from Lyon’s original text. As one biker, Rodney, told the photographer, “Being on a motorcycle don’t make you special at all. And a lot of guys figure that it does.… It’s a big world, man.… You want to see just what it’s like, just step out into a nice big old fat ocean all by yourself in a little rowboat and see just how microscopic you are.”