The Bikeriders
Bike riding is supposed to be freeing, but this bike rider just feels a bit underwhelmed.
Austin Butler as Benny in The Bikeriders
The Bikeriders, directed by Jeff Nichols, originally debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in 2023. After a bumpy distribution process including delays due to strikes as well as the film’s distribution rights being acquired by Focus Features, the film finally hit theaters on June 21, 2024.
Inspired by the book The Bikeriders by photographer Danny Lyon, the movie follows the story of Kathy (Jodie Comer), a midwestern woman who falls in love with Benny (Austin Butler), a sexy but dangerously carefree member of the Vandals biker gang in 1960s Chicago. As the years go by and the gang grows, the Vandals’ increasingly reckless leader, Johnny (Tom Hardy), finds he needs Benny to lead the group, and Kathy needs him not to. The film also stars Mike Faist, Michael Shannon, Norman Reedus, Boyd Holbrook, and Damion Herriman.
Very bluntly, this movie doesn’t really ever click. There are some great performances, as I will discuss later in this review, but ultimately the film finds itself stuck in the middle of two different narrative paths. On the one hand, it is trying to pull off a slice-of-life depiction of a specific cultural moment in the United States: the 1960s midwestern biker gang. While on the other, it tries to tell the story of a love triangle in which Benny is torn between his love for Kathy, and the responsibilities he has to Johnny as a member of the Vandals (with a seemingly random helping of homoerotic tension in one specific scene which is then promptly never mentioned again).
Of course, neither narrative works to their full effect since the film is trying to do both simultaneously, which is a shame because both are interesting ideas if singularly committed to. The movie is often working against itself, sometimes opting to tell the story of the gang and the specific cultural moment by which it was created, and other times opting to focus specifically on the triangle between Kathy, Benny, and Johnny. Nichols’ lack of one clear direction to take the film’s story leaves us with an incomplete picture of both.
This incompleteness means the film can not really cash in on the tension of its aforementioned love triangle of Kathy, Benny, and Johnny. Although it is made obvious that Kathy and Johnny are vying for Benny’s commitment, the movie does not flesh out either relationship outside of some scenes in which the characters are directly addressing the tensions within the triangle. The movie spends little to no time building the relationships that make the triangle, leaving us with a triangle that is implied rather than built and changed by the end of the film.
Furthermore, in a dynamic in which Benny is the catalyst, he feels like an afterthought. The lack of complexity in Benny’s character (and frankly a lack of screentime) makes it so we really don’t care about his choices because we have only been told how in love he and Kathy are and how loyal he is to the gang rather than letting each relationship develop over the course of the film. A lot of this is due to (very minor spoilers ahead) the non-linear structure of the narrative, as rather than allowing our triangle to grow in complexity over its runtime, we jump back and forth into different moments, leaving the characters meandering in a very wobbly and lopsided triangle.
As for the positives, luckily for us while the characters meander we get to see some pretty great performances by Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer as Johnny and Kathy, respectively. The best part of their performances (and one of the high points of the movie, in all honesty) is their commitment to borderline caricaturish midwestern accents. Comer plays it way up and still doesn’t come off as ridiculous, and Hardy adds yet another fantastic voice to his wealth of great vocal performances. Both actors do much more than good accent work, as their performances add a breadth of personality to their respective characters despite a lack of actual storytelling moments within the film.
There are also some good performances by the supporting cast around Comer and Hardy — Damion Herriman as Brucie, specifically — but in the end it feels like a lot of these characters never really mattered other than to briefly show us different aspects of biker culture (which again would be reflected upon differently if the film wasn’t trying to tell the story of a love triangle at the same time). And to answer your question, yes, Austin Butler still sounds like Elvis. Ultimately, Butler’s lack of an accent doesn’t affect much as he isn’t in the film enough for it to really matter.
The costuming, set design, and set dressing are also commendable, as the visual story world is very well stylized to portray a rough-and-tumble side of the 1960s Midwest. I think the best way to describe this movie has already been written, as Vulture’s Allison Whitmore may have put best in her review; “How is The Bikeriders, which revolves around a biker love triangle, this emotionally constipated?”
Despite a vast marketing campaign, an all-star cast, and two excellent performances from Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer, Nichols’ attempt to make two vastly different films at once fizzles out on both ends, resulting in a movie that can’t quite kick it into gear.
Overall Grade:
