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Plot fails revved-up cast of The Bikeriders

The pleasure of looking at Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy – all of whom are terrific actors – is the main appeal of this weakly plotted and thinly characterised film.

Jodie Comer as Kathy and Austin Butler as Benny in The Bikeriders. Picture: Kyle Kaplan/Focus Features
Jodie Comer as Kathy and Austin Butler as Benny in The Bikeriders. Picture: Kyle Kaplan/Focus Features

“It can’t be love. It must just be stupidity.” So says Kathy (Jodie Comer) about her beau Benny (Austin Butler) in The Bikeriders, a drawn-from-life drama about motorcycle clubs written and directed by American filmmaker Jeff Nichols.

Maybe she’s right. Yet when she first clocks Benny, leaning over a pool table in a bar, cue stick in hand, I doubt anyone will think she’s ­stupid. He’s incredibly good-looking, which is why she, heading home, turns back from the exit.

And, unfortunately, that – the pleasure of looking at Butler, Comer and the third star, Tom Hardy, all of whom are terrific actors – is the main appeal of this weakly plotted and thinly characterised film.

It has nowhere near the revs of biker movies it nods to at various times, such as The Wild One from 1953, starring Marlon Brando, or Easy Rider from 1969, starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson.

The setting is the American Midwest in the late 60s to mid 70s and the overall theme is to show how motorcycle clubs started as social groups and evolved into criminal gangs, especially as young men returned from the Vietnam War, fingers still on the trigger and the drug-filled syringe.

The source material is the 1968 book of the same name by American photographer Danny Lyon, who hung out with the Chicago chapter of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club.

In this adaptation, the name is changed to the Vandals and the leader is Johnny (Hardy). Other members include Zipco (Michael Shannon, who has worked on each of the director’s films) and Brucie (Australian actor Damon Herriman).

The director, whose previous films include the impressive coming-of-age drama Mud (2012), starring Matthew McConaughey, uses Danny Lyon (played by Mike Faist) as the fulcrum on which to turn the story.

It’s his interviews with Kathy, for the photo-essay book, that lead us back in time to see what happened, or what she believed happened or was told happened. “Every woman believes she can change a guy,’’ she says.

This is the other theme: whether Benny, who at the outset tells two thugs they’ll have to kill him to take off his club colours, will put his love for a woman before his love for a Harley-Davidson. That opening scene, told in two instalments, is the best in the movie. Kathy tells Danny that Benny has no feelings and that she has not seen him cry, and Butler is convincing as this character. He has the silence, stillness and potential menace of a young Steve McQueen.

The problem, as a viewer, is that this makes their relationship, which soon becomes a marriage, perplexing.

There is no romance, no passion, no sexual frisson, no emotional intimacy, no nothing. It’s almost as though this entire film was made so that Austin Butler – spoiler alert – could express an emotion towards the end.

Similarly, we’re told that Johnny is married with two daughters. We briefly see his wife and we do not see his daughters. As with all the other characters, including Kathy, he is not fleshed out. Their reason for being who they are, for making the decisions they make, are barely explored.

It’s the 1960s, when Hunter S. Thompson, who Danny Lyon asked for advice, was into ­motorcycle gangs (he published his book Hell’s Angels in 1967), yet the closest there is to a ­counter-culture moment is when Brucie muses about bikers being disliked because “everyone needs someone to pick on”. Herriman does his best with the lines he has.

It’s British-born Australian actor Toby Wallace, as The Kid, who becomes the turning point. He’s young, tough and wants to take on the old guard of the biker world. What he does is perhaps the truest moment of the movie.

The actors are not the problem. Comer, so brilliant in the 2018-2022 television series Killing Eve, is the centre of the story and, as an actor, she is compelling, as are Butler and Hardy. It’s the other elements – plot, storytelling, script, emotional connections, engaging the viewer – that fall off the bike.

The Bikeriders (M)

116 minutes
In cinemas

★★½

Stephen Romei
Stephen RomeiFilm Critic

Stephen Romei writes on books and films. He was formerly literary editor at The Australian and The Weekend Australian.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/plot-fails-revvedup-cast-of-the-bikeriders/news-story/3bc59f43ba6ff5e3a2b5856a6a7c4d0d