Movie Review: The Bikeriders (2023)

Seeing the combination of terms “crime", “drama” and “motorcycle” would likely get you thinking the movie would revolve around something involving score settling and violent crime. “The Bikeriders”, the new movie by director Jeff Nichols, released in theaters this Midsummer, shifts the traditional focus from action to literal and figurative close-ups. Using a photographer Danny Lyon’s, who’s received several notable awards related to journalism and visual arts, photo-book “The Bikeriders”, first published back in 1968, as the basis for its plot and settings, the movie turns its storytelling approach into a fascinating two dimensional endeavor with a lot of sequences of close-up shots and medium shots, altogether forming one facet of the story with portrayals of characters while another facet consists of the overarching POV of a chronicler, essentially directing the story and putting the whole of it together. The chronicler’s character in “The Bikeriders” movie is based on the aforementioned Danny Lyon, played by the “Challengers”’ tennis champion Mike Faist.

While Danny in the movie is one recording conversations with characters from the Vandals MC fictional motorcycle club, much of the story is told from the perspective of Kathy Bauer (played by “The Last Duel”’s Jodie Comer), the wife of Austin Butler’s (Elvis, Dune: Part Two) Benny Bauer, one of the members of Vandals MC. This forms a fundamental part of the “The Bikeriders” movie, allowing for the viewer to grasp the full scope of the realities, the lifestyle of each of the characters, and how all that shapes relationships.

_{Film still with Mike Faist and Jodie Comer in "The Bikeriders" movie. Source}

In “The Bikeriders” there is nothing being missed of what it meant to be a member of a motorcycle club back in the 1960s (around 70 percent of dialogues in the film consist of quotes from actual interviews Danny Lyon did back in the day, when he lived among bikers in American Midwest), including picnics, bonfires and brawls, however the movie hasn’t got a real, discernible plot device. The only thing that I could identify as being closest to the aforementioned was the expansion, creating new chapters of the club. Yet this doesn’t seem to be the goal of the founder, Tom Hardy’s Johnny Davis, and is being pursued only by odd character throughout the movie. Rather than intentionally heading somewhere plot-wise, the movie dives into weighing pros and cons of the biker lifestyle. There is also an ever present sense of attempts to accentuate that what is decent or even classy about being a biker, making the contrast between a criminal and someone who’d pursue the lifestyle in ways that don’t endanger people outside it starker. Starting from tattoos, leather, denim jackets, haircuts to the music of engines to references to movies “The Wild One” and “Easy Rider”, starring Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper respectively; all create something of an idyll, which gets increasingly ruined by characters that are more violent, do drugs or act in ways that lack class. Enter “Pistol”’s Toby Wallace, who plays a character called The Kid. The screen time he gets there is relatively short, but impactful. Into his character Nichols seems to have compressed everything that was ugly about the possible future of biker culture. Looking at it from this perspective, in my humble opinion, “The Bikeriders” would make for an excellent prequel to a loosely connected follow up feature. Ideally more R rated than “The Bikeriders”’ R too. “The Bikeriders” R, in my opinion, is too pale, lacking full bloodedness in almost every respect of activities related to biker lifestyle.

I guess the thing I liked most about this movie was the perfect ratio of chosen camera shots and the length of those. Surely the source photo-book had been a great help in getting the fitting aesthetic sense for the shots, but to me it looked like that had been only half of the magic there, another half being the creation of sequences with a perfect flow during editing phase. In “The Bikeriders” this aspect, particularly when used for character portrayals, has ended up creating a melody of camera shots, giving those scenes a soul as well as providing the movie with more of the last century vintage vibe.

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