The Bikeriders
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The marketing for this film is extremely misleading. It is touted as a story of violent outlaw biker culture and the fight for one person's soul (Benny) between the club's president (Johnny) and Benny's love interest (Kathy). While this is a very small element of the film, it is hardly central to the plot. It is fair to say that Benny is a free spirit that only feels life's thrills when he's on his motorcycle. He's invincible when he's on the bike and very vulnerable when he's not.
The movie is about the formation of a midwestern MC (motorcycle club) when Johnny (Tom Hardy) watches a televised showing of The Wild Ones starring Marlon Brando. He is a middle class laborer driving trucks, has two children and a wife and it's clear that he is still living vicariously through the romanticized portrayal of rebellion Hollywood has so effortlessly commodified to desperate people seeking release. The scene in particular that grabs Johnny's attention is when someone asks Brando's character 'What are ya rebellin' against?' and Brando responds cooly, detached, 'What have ya got?' That line strikes Johnny as relevant because it is; he still wants to feel free.
The film never really explains where Benny (Austin Butler) is from but if Johnny wants to be Brando, Benny all but is. Likewise, the film never really goes into detail why Benny is like this but presents him as is, the ideal that Johnny wishes all of the guys in the club could be: fearless, detached, in a perpetual state of rebellion. I know there are some that will say Butler isn't really giving us much to work with here, but that is entirely the point of the character. He is the epitome of rebelling against everything. Living in the moment, for the moment and of the moment regardless of what might happen in the next ten seconds. As long as he in a state of defiance against any that would limit his choices, he is content.
Kathy (Jodie Comer) is the portal character for the film, a midwesterner that knows a lot about nothing but is capable of learning. She's far from a babe in the woods, living in Chicago in the 60s, holding down a job and suffering through a frustrating relationship with a boyfriend that ditches her after Benny spends the entire night and the following work day on the street outside their house just smoking cigarettes and brooding in the direction of the front door. Angry that Kathy didn't force him to leave while he was at work-Kathy was invited by her girlfriend to hang out and party with the club the previous night, met Benny and he offered her a ride home but only after they spent the entire night on the road and didn't get back until 4 AM-he packs up his meager belongings and drives off in a rage. Kathy wants to reprimand Benny for causing this to happen but she can't contain a wry grin as she is instantly attracted to his sigma sinewave. She doesn't understand Benny or his mysterious mode but she finds it attractive (as most girls probably would) and she's flattered that he sat out there all night and all day waiting for her to come talk to him (as most girls probably would be).
The film is presented in a hybrid of documentary and dramatic narrative, and it is based off of a photojournalist's account of these events as portrayed in a book called, of course, The Bikeriders. So this film is based on true events and I'm compelled to go and look for it as the end credits roll with actual pictures that were taken and published in it. The journalist, 'Fast' Danny Lyon (the name of the actual photojournalist with a nickname surely given to him by the guys in the Vandals), visits Kathy every few years to catch up with her, take photos, record statements and interviews and get a general barometer of 'how things are' at that time as well as to see how living within the purview of a MC has affected her life. The book's materials were compiled over the course of eight years ('65 to '73) so there is a good period of time to evaluate the effects the lifestyle had on her.
Fast Danny is known by the club and they invite him to their gatherings and parties. He interviews them, takes photos, drinks with them and documents their lives, loves and pastimes as well. He isn't doing expose journalism but is interested in the emergence of this uniquely American subculture and thinks that people would be interested in learning more about it. Some of his best interview segments are with Cockroach (Emory Cohen), a loveable goof that enjoys 'being dirty' (dirt and grime on him) and eating bugs because it seems like a disgusting thing to do (but he also likes eating bugs.) At one point, he actually explains that people are only repulsed by eating bugs because of their own inhibitions, and he considers the act no different from eating steak: it's all in your mind.
Likewise, his interviews with Zipco (Michael Shannon) are some of the most compelling scenes in the film: when Zipco explains that his brother didn't want to join the army to go fight in Vietnam but was drafted, Zipco made every effort to get in voluntarily, passed all of the tests and showed all of the aptitude for being a qualified soldier but he was rejected because the recruiter told him 'he wasn't a valid candidate'. In other words, they didn't like the cut of his jib and rejected him because he looked like a thug. This embittered him to where he now hates anything that has to do with 'the establishment', including college and the way it funnels the undeserving into positions they may not want but that they end up taking. Zipco states that 'anybody that can't work with their hands ain't worth a damn'. This is an incredibly sympathetic role for Shannon to take, considering how often he plays wholly unlikeable characters in films and I want to see more of it. He is an actor that looks like he is hiding deep pain within his soul and if that is the case, he makes good use of it here.
Interviews with the other members of the club are equally compelling and this group of cast offs, misfits and undesirables bring just the right charm to what could have been a very unengaging and uninteresting flick. The relationship between Benny, Johnny and Kathy is at the heart of this film but all of these people need each other in order to have a reason. And this is interesting because none of them are bad people at all. They're hobbyists that have been left behind by the progress of American culture and they have nowhere else to go (think of how we see bikers today to understand how we have been socially engineered by the state and media to mistrust them). Even if they have families, jobs or other lives, they are all stray dogs with unique quirks and characteristics that give them cause to respect each other. These guys aren't criminals, and for most of the film they don't engage in criminal activity. They just ride, drink, get in fights with each other and then drink again to put it behind them.
As I said before, the film falsely promotes a narrative that Kathy and Johnny are battling over Benny's soul but we know from the start that neither of them can ever stake a claim to it. The film has a lot to say about managing expectations and that there are no guarantees the thing you love you will you back. Johnny, rightly, tells Kathy "Benny's gonna do what Benny's gonna do.' He never becomes overly emotional or loses his cool but this is not to say that he doesn't feel anything at all. He has great passion for the club but he knows he will never be the kind of man he wants to be. Benny is the kind of man Johnny wants to be and he sees him as the ultimate evolution of what the Vandals should turn into: free spirits without a care in the world. So in a sense, Benny is both the son AND the father he never had, a guy he wants to hand everything down to while at the same time admiring his almost elemental sense of independence from....everything. He never sees Kathy as a threat. Johnny's fear, rightly founded, is that eventually his own MC will not love him back as time passes.
Kathy, on the other hand, believes that Benny will continue to pursue his inclinations to what she feels will be his own self destruction, so she fears that to continue living in this fashion is akin to suicide. After Benny has a terrible run in with a couple of locals in a bar for not taking off his colors, he is hospitalized and, as Kathy describes it, there is a fear that his leg may get amputated. She tells Fast Danny she has never seen Benny cry before, and she believes that men shouldn't cry when they get beat up or lose a fight. She says that when men cry, it's over something deeper that affects them more profoundly (she dismisses men that cry over pain as 'not real men'). When Benny fears he may not ride again over potentially losing a foot, she tells Danny 'that's the closest I've ever seen to him crying.' And it's because to deny Benny the ability to ride is to deny him the opportunity to be free and to live in defiance of the established order. He has an almost childlike reaction to running out of gas while running from the cops, which seems to bother him more than being caught: he was enjoying the chase. Later on, the movie suggests that it may not specifically be riding that gives him that freedom but the idea of that freedom, embodied at that point in his life by motorcycles, is what makes his motor run. All of the guys in the Vandals, in fact, are attracted more to the stigma that comes with riding a bike in the 60s than the actual bikes themselves. One of the characters describes it as feeling 'unsavory'.
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