'The Bikeriders' A Review

The Bikeriders is a period drama about a Chicago motorcycle club in the late 60's/early 70's inspired by the photo-book of the same name.

Tom Hardy plays Johnny the founder of the club and is mostly adrift in the performance with a script that gives him little to do and little direction to pursue. He's a compelling actor(as always) but his accent choice isn't great and he relies on tics that we've seen him deploy in better movies. Austin Butler is Benny, the James Dean surrogate, and he simply does not measure up. On paper Benny is an idea not a character and Butler plays it that way, frequently just pensively starring off camera, there is no humanity present and as a result his screentime and arc are mostly a waste. Conversely, Jodie Comer as Kathy is excellent, the accent is perfect and she is able to convey actual emotion throughout(the only real heart involved in the whole picture). By an oddment of the screenplay, she serves basically as the narrator, nearly all her scenes are "interviews" where she is providing exposition, she only has a couple actual scenes with other actors. She executes it wonderfully but it is a terrible choice, a waste of her considerable talent. The supporting cast has little to do and make little impact aside from Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus, and Michael Shannon(the sole cast member with any ties to the actual city of Chicago).

The film is shot in suburban Cincinnati and it shows, nothing looks authentic, there is no sense of actual place and this is compounded by the fact that the three leads are British and aside from Shannon none of the actors are from Chicago let alone the Midwest. Its a baffling production choice compounded by the incomprehensible casting choices. Again, to give Comer her due, she is the only one that actually sounds midwestern and properly evokes its people. As a result of these choices the film feels like it has no identity, there is no truth to it, it is not evocative of place, culture, or people. To compound these mistakes even further the structure of the screenplay is too faithful to its source material, it feels like a sprawling piece of journalism not a narrative film. When you take a step back there is no actual story here only what Comer is able to inject by force of will.

A rare but extreme miss by writer/director Jeff Nichols. One of the big reasons Mud was so effective was that it was a film about Arkansas filmed in Arkansas starring actors, if not all from AK, at least from the South.

As my old man would say- that don't cut shit in Chicago.

Currently in theaters, coming soon to VOD.

Don't See It.