By Sandra Hall
THE BIKERIDERS ★★★
(M) 116 minutes
Welcome to Macho Central, the bolshie heart of the Vandals, a Chicago biker gang enjoying their heyday in the mid-1960s and early ’70s. The Bikeriders is a fictional version of a book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, who rode with a Chicago club, the Outlaws, for almost two years, taking pictures and recording his conversations with its members and their intimates.
Tom Hardy (left) and Austin Butler are members of the Vandals motorcycle club in The Bikeriders.Credit: AP
The star interviewee is Kathy Bauer, wife of Benny Cross, the gang’s Brando-ish glamour boy. Played by Jodie Comer employing a satirically broad midwestern accent, she supplies the narration and she’s the main reason for seeing the film.
Kathy doesn’t quite know what she’s unearthed when she walks into a bar one night to meet a girlfriend who’s taken up with one of the bikers. Wide-eyed and quaking, she has just batted away a series of improper propositions and is preparing to leave when she spots a soulful-looking Benny (Austin Butler) peering into his beer glass while pondering nothing much.
By the next day, her boyfriend has walked out and Benny has moved in. However, she’s about to realise there are a couple of unbreakable strings attached to her new relationship. The toughest and most durable is Benny’s love of the Vandals, and working in tandem with this is his devotion to Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), the club’s leader, who regards him as his protege and closest ally. In other words, it’s a man’s world and Kathy has to get on with it or get out.
Jodie Comer plays Kathy, who is married to Vandal Benny (Austin Butler). Credit:
Writer-director Jeff Nichols is best known for 2016’s Loving, the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, who took the state of Virginia to court in 1967 over its ban on interracial marriage. All of his films have been set in regional America, a place that emerges from them as an incubator of the oddest of extremes in human behaviour, and The Bikeriders, set in Chicago’s outskirts, fits the same pattern.
It’s a study in hypermasculinity and there are times when I wasn’t sure if Nichols was sending it up or buying into it. His cameras spend a lot of time in thrall to Benny’s silent ruminations, which are worth such attention only if you’re fascinated by his extraordinarily long eyelashes.
Benny has just one preoccupation – the need to resist anyone rash enough to try to separate him from his biker jacket. You’ll have to kill me first, he tells a couple of thugs who want to do just that, and the gusto with which they accept this challenge results in a predictable amount of damage all around.
Hardy’s Johnny has a slightly more political attitude to the concept of tribal loyalty. He likes to avoid trouble if possible. If not, he goes crazy.
There’s a measure of black humour in all this. Michael Shannon, a regular collaborator of Nichols’, makes a wonderfully deadpan appearance as Zipco, the gang’s more eloquent member. He gets a set-piece – a lengthy monologue railing against the “pinkos” who infest every facet of society. Yet buried amid this catalogue of resentments is his most serious grievance – that he was rejected for service in the Vietnam War on psychological grounds. In later life – if he got that far – I imagine him as one of Trump’s most ardent supporters.
It’s Comer who anchors the film. Kathy is a clear-eyed sceptic who is determined not to lapse into the state of stoic endurance she sees in the lives of the other gang wives. She wants out but she also wants Benny, and there lies her dilemma. It’s a performance that confirms her place as one of the most compelling actors around, but it belongs in a better picture.
The Bikeriders is released in cinemas on July 4.
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