The Bikeriders – 2024
Blind Rebels Motorcycle Club. Never mind that in The Wild One, the iconic 1953 biker film starring Marlon Brando, the club was actually titled the Black Riders M-cycle Club. Blind Rebels is somehow what I heard when watching the clip of the Brando film. The “blind” part may have been a Freudian slip in my understanding, one I naturally fell into after watching Jeff Nichols’s film The Bikeriders.
Nichols’s film has plenty of blind rebels in it. It has a lot of guys (and some ladies) who aren’t seeing straight as they resist the established world around them. Perhaps they are fighting against some things that need to be pushed against, but the collective way they do it is often filled with violence, vengeance, lust, and a childish shirking of responsibility. Some of them they walk blind while being unaware they’re doing it. Others turn a blind eye to reason and good sense on purpose so they can, at last, belong to the family they never had. Still others seem to meander into this blindness as a tacit rejection of the numbing normality and mundanity of everyday life.
That rejection of the numbness of everyday societal systems is most fully seen in this film in the life of Johnny. This is a man who stands mostly unquestioned as the helm of the riding gang called the Vandals. Early on we see the exact moment when Johnny had what he took as his own biker’s epiphany. Sitting in the living room in front of a TV with his wife and daughters in the background, Johnny sees Brando in The Wild One answering the question of what he was rebelling against by saying “Whattaya got?” Johnny tries the phrase out for himself, echoing Brando’s phrase in a whisper just a few feet away from his wife. When his wife asks him what he just said, he responds with a dismissive “Nothin.” That word is one Johnny will use in a similar way near the end of the film in a scene that is casually devastating.
Played by Tom Hardy with a heartbreakingly justifiable (in cinematic terms) Brando impression, Johnny is a man who chooses a boy’s path to answer a man’s questions. Love and decent communication may have allowed his family to enter his heart if he had let them. They may have filled Johnny’s deep need for community. Instead, Johnny surrounds himself with a man’s world of followers who rebel against “whattaya got” and hang on his every word and bike pedal.
Very few people in Johnny’s world challenge him as much as Kathy. This whirlwind of a brunette, who first meets Johnny in the gang’s hangout bar one night, is brave enough to bring her fire up against Johnny’s own fire. Director Nichols allows Jodie Comer to inhabit this whirlwind and take center stage in a way that makes her the unmistakable soul of the film. Her Kathy is not only one of the prime reasons this film should exist in a film sea of Scorsese knockoffs. She allows The Bikeriders to be in a class with Scorsese’s own The Irishman in its brave revisionism. Scorsese had the courage in that 2019 film to take his style of soaring men-in-crime film and let it fall to the ground with an anticlimactic and guilt-ridden thud. Nichols, here, dares to take that type of Scorsese picture and electrify it by letting the whole thing be told from the standpoint of a woman.
Kathy starts out as the girlfriend of Benny, a gang member so impetuous and passionate that Johnny sees him as the decisive future of his gang. When it becomes clear to Kathy that Benny will destroy himself if he continues in the gang, Kathy comes straight to Johnny and has the guts to declare about Benny, “He’s mine.” It is a testament to Comer’s performance that you sort of believe Johnny might be tempted to listen.
As for Austin Butler as Benny, the film almost gets lost in the question of what everyone else is seeing in him. Kathy is smitten by him and Johnny believes Benny has what it takes to lead the gang into the future. For us as an audience, we understand Benny’s actions are rash and sometimes shocking, but Butler himself doesn’t initially hold the screen in the magnetic way that would make us believe others would be pulled toward him. As the film goes on and Benny begins to make choices of his own, though, we begin to see a complex character forming right in front of us. As we look back, we realize that Johnny’s own interest in Benny’s future leadership might arise from his realization that Benny is a blank slate waiting to be written on. In that sense, Benny’s not-thereness makes some sense. Then there is the final scene where Benny and Kathy share the frame, a moment when Butler is all there and lets us see what was inside him all along.
The film could have mocked Johnny the gang leader and could have just as easily worshipped his every stylish move, but this is a film whose compassionate gaze instead allows it to step into 1972 Coppola territory in a year when the great director himself seems to have misplaced his steps. (Full disclosure : I have not yet seen Megalopolis.) The film’s compassion extends to all the gang members, really, and you can see that in the way it takes time to hang out and listen to them talk around campfires and give us glimpses of deeper longings that bubble up only after a little alcohol has seeped in. This is about the best the film could possibly do by the memories of the bikers in the source (Danny Lyon’s photobook) on which it is based. These are men who are often blind, but who are allowed some moments of clarity in which, in fact, they do not act on the violence that seems to have infected their souls. They can, against all odds, choose to respond with peace and respond with community in rare moments that remind us that they are human.
In the song played over the closing credits, we hear the line “he grew up with no one to love.” This may sum up the key issue with many of this film’s characters. It is to film’s credit that, by the time those credits roll, you are not high on the film’s cool needle drops or surges of violence. You are mostly feeling the weight of lovesickness and the hope that it, along with the blind nothin’ moment, would be redeemed.
