The Bikeriders (2023)

Rated R because it is fundamentally about fun crime.  These are guys who don't need to get into crime, but embrace the biker lifestyle.  Apparently, if you want to be a biker, you gotta like crime.  That means that there's a lot of violence, death, and sexual assault in the movie.  There's also a ton of alcoholism and drug use in the movie.  Add to that some pretty gnarly language, and you have The Bikeriders with an R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Nichols

Oh man, I'm kicking and screaming writing this right now.  I just wrote 1,667 words and now I have to write this?  I'm exhausted.  Honestly, I'm plum tuckered out.  The easy answer is to caffeinate myself, but my tum-tum is a little queasy and tea sounds like it wouldn't quite help that.  So what am I going to do?  I'M GOING TO POWER THROUGH THIS AND MAKE IT SOMETHING WORTH READING!

I was going to embrace spooky season.  I really was.  It's October 1st, and how exciting would it have been if every movie that I wrote about in October was somehow horror related?  But every year, Spooky Season feels more and more like a chore to me.  I was going to watch Abigail on Peacock, but then I saw The Bikeriders was also on there.  Now here's the reason that I'm really full of crap.  (Something I freely admit!) I know nothing about The Bikeriders outside the fact that I saw the poster all over France and the movie looked prestige as heck.  Spoiler alert: It absolutely was.  You know how you are not supposed to judge a book by its cover?  Yeah, I totally did that and succeeded.  I have to say, I'm a pretty big fan of this movie.  Not absolutely.  There was actually a long stretch of the movie where I did not care for it, and that mostly came down to poltiics.

There's something so fundamentally toxic at the core of The Bikeriders.  The Bikeriders harkens back to that Jack Kerouac, On the Road vibes.  There was something so counter-culture about getting on a bike and forgetting society's norms.  At its core, it should be transcendental as can  be.  It's forgetting that the world shapes people to match society.  Instead, it's embracing nature and the open road.  It's finding community in like-minded individuals and it values the individual members of the group.  Fine.  I get that.  But we also live in a world where the Proud Boys exist.  Now, if you didn't stay for the whole movie, you might think that The Bikeriders is a story embracing the chaos of biker gangs.  Johnny makes the Vandals seem to be the perfect club for finding oneself.  I should note here, before I get too far, that this is a movie based on a true story --the book being a long-form expose on the Vandals and their culture over the course of years.  I don't know how much of the adaptation is true because I never read The Bikeriders book.  Again, as much as I applaud the counter-culture element of it all, I'm definitely not into motorcycle culture.  Anyway, Johnny starts off the story as the most wholesome character imaginable.  He liked to race his bike with his friends.  He liked to talk bikes.  He's a big fan of The Wild One, a movie I now need to watch.  But because Marlon Brando likes to get into fights, Johnny models his bike club after this band of rebels that he watches on screen.

And for a while, there's something really sexy about being a rogue or an outlaw.  There's a reason that the rebel is such an appealing archetype.  THe notion of not playing by other people's rules is an appealing concept.  It's something I probably won't do.  I love me some rules too much.  But I get it.  It's that fantasy that I'm harboring.  But to bring it back to the Proud Boys, the Vandals under Johnny's watch gets pretty disturbing.  It's rebellion for rebellion's sake.  I kept having this thought that, as dark as the movie got at times when it came to violence and whatnot, that these were children out of something like Lord of the Flies.  Once these man-children had free reign and found out that no one was going to stop their awful behavior, everything had escalated to the point where it was no longer about the bikes.  That final scene with Johnny, most of the motorcycle club is sitting out in their cars, watching the carnage ahead of them unspool.  It misses the points of being passionate about what is liked.  

I'm having a stray thought that I want to follow.  I hope I don't lose my original thoughts.  Is The Bikeriders a criticism on fandom?  I tend to embrace some pretty healthy fandoms.  I'm a Star Trek and a Doctor Who fan.  I also like movies; hence the blog.  While there are incredibly toxic elements of any fandom, including the ones that I'm a part of, it seems like the more obsessive any fandom gets, the more awful it gets.  This is my whole sports thing.  Hardcore sports fans scare me.  They honestly do.  The amount of vitriol and investment that goes into that kind of tribalism is scary.  If today, I renounced my Star Trek fandom, few people would care.   Heck, the number might border on no one.  But when we look at The Bikeriders, people are almost killed for turning their back on their passion.  There's something repugnant about the shifting of priorities.  The most obvious example in the movie is Cockroach, who --in a drunken haze --reveals his passion for wanting to be a motorcycle cop.  Now, part of that comes from the anti-establishment guy embracing something that is so polar opposite from what Cockroach has embraced in the past.  But very little of it seems to be about the cop element.  It's the idea of turning in one's colors that illustrates obsessive fan behavior.  That's where Jeff Nichols sells me on the film as a whole.

The more obsessive the fan, the more it forgets the core of the belief.  Johnny is a victim of his own press.  He's a  guy who started a riding club.  The boys looked to him and he modelled himself after the rogue Marlon Brando.  It was boys playing dress up.  But as the film progressed, we see Johnny losing himself to the very cult he created.  The entire movie, he bemoans his position as the head of the Vandals.  He's always in a place where he wants to pass it off.  Part of that seems from personal exhaustion, being Johnny the Leader all the time.  But the other part of that is that he personally might not like what the Vandals have become.  The violence and debauchery is escalating.  Kathy is almost raped by the new members, whom Johnny laments as people who don't listen to him.  He has created a monster and he has to both feed it and kill it at the same time.  When he's gunned down by a zealot of the faith, it only makes the more sense.  Johnny goes from being the guy who is indulging in everyone's worst instincts to being the guy who has to be the stopgap on gangland criminality.  It's a fascinating role.  

I hate that I'm talking about Johnny so much, but his character was core to my initially not accepting this film to fully embracing it.  The part I actually liked throughout is the fact that Jodie Comer's Kathy is the main character of the film.  Okay, that might be easily debated.  She's definitely the narrator of the film.  We view all of the chaos from her, the closest thing we have as an avatar for a non-chopper culture. Comer is an amazing actress.  She's always been an amazing actress.  She might be the most underused and underrated actresses out there right now.  Comer takes Kathy and almost makes her a caricature, which is kind of brilliant. (This sounds like a backhanded compliment, so please bear with me.)  A lot of Kathy's relatability comes from the fact that we get that she was a Midwestern housewife who embraced a life of chaos because of love.  There's such a shorthand for how Kathy and Benny fall in love that we need Comer to make strong choices.  We get to understand that relationship that seems impossible and Comer does the heavy lifting on that.  I don't know what the real Kathy sounded like.  For all I know, Comer is dead-on doing an impression of the real Kathy and I'm giving her so much credit for making a strong decision.  But Kathy might be my favorite Jodie Comer role, and that's coming from a Killing Eve fan.  

Nichols challenges himself with this movie.  Considering that The Bikeriders isn't so much a traditional narrative --hence having a threadbare plot --it does act more like a cleverly crafted documentary.  Again, I'll always preach documentary over biopic.  (It's kind of a biopic, right?)   But he's got so many balls in the air, I'm amazed he lands them all.  The movie dances between Johnny, Kathy, and Benny.  Sometimes the three are all in the same scene. But Kathy's narrative is about what all three are doing, so she dances between all three personalities.  But every so often, we get this almost sympathetic story about a psychopath only referred to as The Kid.  The Kid is the White Walkers of the story.  He's there and he's closing in on our main characters.  We don't always know what The Kid's motivation is, but we know something major with this kid is going to happen.  Yeah, about ten minutes before the big Kid reveal happens, we can guess what that is going to be.  But by the time he shows up in the film, he feels inevitable.  It's a punch in the gut that the movie needs for the conclusion.  So good.

It's funny.  I haven't talked about Benny and I really consider a good chunk of this movie to be Benny's story.  Benny is the acolyte.  He's not a zealot, but he appears to be a zealot in so many scenes of the film.  I will clarify: Benny is unhealthy as can be.  I don't want a Benny in my life.  But Benny is almost the difference between a parishioner and a cultist.  The cultists need escalation.  Benny, for all of the crap that he doesn't want to do in this movie, is about the bike and the relationship.  The movie starts off with Benny refusing to take off his jacket in a bar.  Ultimately, this action leads to him in the hospital with a very real chance of losing his foot.  But the big fear isn't that he's going to lose his foot.  The real fear is that he will not be able to bike without a foot.  And for a long time, we're left really angry at Benny.  He makes his priorities clear.  The club comes first.  Kathy comes second.  His own needs come last.  (In a way.  He's incredibly selfish and self-sacrificing at the same time.) When that ending comes, it teases an element of doubt while still reassuring that Benny genuinely does love Kathy.  It's this really subtle change in him that had to be a nightmare to get just right.  Part of this probably goes to Austin Butler (who still has a bit too much Elvis to shrug off).  

The Bikeriders was something that I went into excited, lost that excitement, and then got it back in spades.  It's a mafia movie, if truth be told. But it's one of the good ones.