Jeff Nichols is a director who has had some decent success in the indie film realm with movies such as Take Shelter,  Mud, Midnight Special, and Loving. His latest film The Bikeriders is another small movie with a small intimate story. It’s what he’s good at. Telling small stories. He once again works with Michael Shannon in a small role as a hard-drinking and smoking Zipco, but he’s not the center of this story. He just likes to work with Nichols. Nichols has a whole new group of stars for this film that premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival with mild success. 

Kathy (Jodie Comer) is a woman who is the narrator of this story featuring her husband Benny (Austin Butler) and a group of men who ride motorcycles and hang out drinking and smoking led by Johnny (Tom Hardy) called the vandals. They are from Chicago, Illinois.  She inadvertently becomes a member of the gang when she walks into a bar and becomes friends with Benny. They eventually get married. She’s telling this story to a young college student Danny (Mike Giast) who turns the story into a book the film is based on.

I have very little experience with motorcycle gangs. As a little kid, my father was friends with a guy named Big Mark in the town of Lowell, Massachusetts where I grew up. He was a member of The Hells Angels, a pretty big biker gang. We hung out with the family sometimes, but that was the extent of that. Also, I remember the Warlocks were a big biker gang in Daytona Beach, FL. near where I live. I have limited knowledge of these gangs, but from what I remember they partied and were mostly up to no good. Similar to the one featured in this film.

Jodie Comer as the narrator steals the movie from all these tough guys like Hardy, Butler, and the rest of the cast that is filled with good character actors like Beau Knapp, Carl Glausman, Damon Herriman, and Boyd Holbrook. She has a Chicago accent and plays her role seriously even though there are a few laughs to go around. She has a believability factor to her that made me pay attention to every word she said. I was glued to her throughout the movie. She was that intriguing to me throughout the length of the film.

Butler and Hardy on the other hand were a little different. They played their roles very seriously and didn’t have much to say at all. Butler was a very quiet loner of a character until he met Comer’s character. This suited him as an actor very well based on his other films, Elvis and Dune 2, that I’ve seen. Hardy is another one who likes to play the quiet type. He succeeds at that in this role once again. He only speaks when he needs to and that is hard for him to do at times. Because he’s the leader of the gang he’s forced to talk and make decisions which is his undoing in the end.  Hardy is a master at playing these types of brooding quiet types and he once again does a good job of exuding that persona here. These two are vastly different from others, especially Comer in this movie.

Nichols captures a time and place in America in the 70s and 70s but only alludes to the real problems in the country at the time. He barely touches on the Vietnam War and the drugs and political strife that is going on in the country. There are problems with different people in the story but he decides that the main focus should be on the core group of characters. He even builds up a villain character, but it seems forced into the narrative. I wished there had been a more gritty story here. He didn’t go to the level this story should have gone to be as effective as it could have been. A television clip of the Wild One starring Marlon Brando comes on and this is far from that film from my perspective. 

The Bikeriders is a good movie that I had hoped would be better. There is a narrator played by Comer who is very good. She steals the film from all the testosterone-filled greasy dirty bikers. It’s not a bad thing with her Chicago accent and all, but I wanted a dirty gritty story to go with these guys who look the part but rarely act it. Butler and Hardy are both good as brooding tough guys, but they get lost in a meandering story. Nichols, who is great at little indie stories, tries to do a little bit more here but doesn’t go to the level he needed to to make this story more serious than it was. It had serious moments, I’m not saying it doesn’t,  it could have gone the extra length to be a little darker and gritty for my liking. All in all, it was still a worthwhile film-going experience. 

3 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen