A Movie About Being Cool Shouldn’t Be This Uptight

Photo: Kyle Kaplan/Focus Features

The Bikeriders would be 50 percent better if Tom Hardy kissed Austin Butler when their characters are conspiring in a back corner of a party, their faces so close it looks like they’re slow dancing. I’m not saying this because I need to see Hardy plant a wet one on Butler, though the world wouldn’t exactly be worse for having that image in it. It’s just that the movie is filled with simmering emotions that could really stand to boil over, and a biker-gang leader’s possibly homoerotic fixation on his group’s most photogenic member is simply the most obvious way this could happen. The Bikeriders is about a love triangle tucked into the larger tale of the rise of a motorcycle club called the Vandals and its decline into criminality as the ’60s give way to the disillusioned ’70s — an arc with a tragic grandeur that appears to embarrass writer-director Jeff Nichols. He does everything he can to mute the innate melodrama by breaking up the chronology and moderating it through two framing devices that work like Brita filters for strong feelings. It’s an ironic choice for a movie that, more than anything else, is about men coming up with a hypermacho pretext to justify enjoying each other’s company.

Nichols does know his way around tortured masculinity. His debut, Shotgun Stories, is about an escalating feud between half-brothers outside Little Rock after the death of the father who abandoned one family to reinvent himself and start a new one. It is anchored by a ferocious performance from Michael Shannon, whom Nichols would go on to cast in all his films — in The Bikeriders, he’s a colorful Vandal named Zipco — including his second (and best) feature, Take Shelter, in which the actor plays a man racked with anxieties about protecting his family that manifest in apocalyptic dreams. The Bikeriders is adjacent to these earlier movies without inhabiting that same sense of self-immolating conviction, a fact I’d peg to its setting in Chicago instead of the American South, the region that has been key to Nichols’s work.

The film wallows in a particular brand of Americana — denim and leather, cornfields and Harley-Davidsons, crumpled packs of cigarettes and boilermakers on the bar at a dive — without being comfortable laying claim to it. While the narrative is fictional, Nichols was inspired by photographer Danny Lyon’s book documenting the Outlaws Motorcycle Club in the late ’60s. He writes the equivalent of Lyon into the film as an observer, but this adds nothing except distance from the story and a chance to see Mike Faist in the role with a chinstrap beard and a camera. It’s as though Nichols needed to mark himself, like Danny, as someone playing tourist in this scene. It’s a needless choice, and channeling the narrative through Danny’s interviews with Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer), the wife of one of the more prominent Vandals, is bafflingly self-defeating.

That’s not Comer’s fault — she’s phenomenal in the role, more than holding her own against an unprecedented ensemble of aspiring and current internet boyfriends, and alternately salty and vulnerable as a woman who’s constantly surprised to find herself drifting toward the outskirts of society. (“I used to be respectable,� she sighs with a Gracie Allen chirrup as she wanders through a house cluttered with bikers and their beer cans and other debris.) The men are what Nichols is really interested in, and using Kathy to mediate his fascination just ends up doing her a disservice. The Bikeriders is like GoodFellas if Lorraine Bracco were the sole narrator, its perspective limited by a character who’s allowed to see only so much of the inner workings of the club and the guys at its center. Maybe Nichols is trying to convey what it’s like to fall in love with this community the way Kathy does in this movie’s version of the GoodFellas Copacabana scene, set at the Vandals’ bar hangout. She’s uncomfortable there until she spots Benny (Butler) standing at a pool table looking like spotlights were invented for him. He barely says a thing and somehow she’s climbing on the back of his motorcycle, clinging to him for a group ride that’s portrayed as a giddily ritualized courtship ceremony. He also doesn’t need to speak when he chases her boyfriend away, and you understand perfectly why she marries him a few months later.

Benny isn’t much of a talker in general. He’s the model biker: devoted, loyal, and impulsive, never one to back away from a fight and always looking incredible in his club jacket. He’s also, as much as the movie is willing to say it, a birdbrained fool, which saps a lot of the energy out of Kathy and Vandals leader Johnny’s (Hardy) tug-of-war over him — Kathy wants Benny to quit the club; Johnny wants him to take over. She speculates that Johnny, who has a wife and kids and a real job, envies Benny’s genuine commitment to the lifestyle. Certainly, none of the other Vandals, played by Emory Cohen, Karl Glusman, Damon Herriman, Boyd Holbrook, and Beau Knapp, look the part quite so perfectly. The Bikeriders is a film guided by aesthetics — with its slightly yellowed tone, it could double as an ad campaign for the kind of heritage-workwear company that charges $149 for a loopwheel T-shirt. That’s not by accident. For all the outlaw posturing, what inspired Johnny to found the club was the sight of Marlon Brando in The Wild One. And it’s the sight of Johnny on his motorcycle, in a raw-denim outfit Brooklyn men still try to emulate, that draws in a kid played by Toby Wallace, the heartbreaking Australian actor from Babyteeth and The Royal Hotel, who goes on to play a significant part in the final act.

The movie’s focus on the look of these characters, always tempered through Kathy’s point of view, also feels like a way of dodging around how deeply romantic it finds the Vandals by keeping its appreciation at surface level. The real Lyon, who became a member of the Outlaws to capture their lives, has said the club was rife with racial resentment and prone to accessorizing with Nazi flags and Iron Crosses. None of that stuff comes up with their fictional equivalent. When their scene sours, it’s due to the arrival of a new generation of members who are scarred from Vietnam and take all the club’s self-mythologizing to heart. The theme of innocence lost would be more effective if the movie dove into the simultaneous desires for belonging and nonconformity the club was born from, into the primordial emotions of these men who want to escape from the roles assigned to them and then trap themselves in new ones that are just as confining. Instead, it relays all that history secondhand, as though shrugging it off. The result is that The Bikeriders just feels constipated — and that’s no condition in which to ride a motorcycle.