THE BIKERIDERS is writer/director Jeff Nichols’ (TAKE SHELTER, MUD, LOVING) version of a biker gang movie. It’s loosely adapted from a 1968 book by Danny Lyon, who spent several years riding with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club of Chicago. Nichols incorporated Lyon as a character (played by Mike Faist of WEST SIDE STORY and CHALLENGERS) who’s spending time with the fictional Vandals motorcycle club, taking photos and recording interviews, and if you step back you can picture a version where he’s the lead. We would learn about this world along with him and then it would sort of become his story as he deals with the macho insecurities raised by trying to fit in with these guys. Eventually he realizes it’s bringing out a dark side of him but in the end he learns about himself or some shit. You know the drill. Like a sleeveless version of Matthew Rhys’ character in A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

Nichols makes the more interesting choice of keeping Lyon as strictly a listener and framing the movie around his interviews with Kathy (Jodie Comer, STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER), wife of one of the Vandals. So we hear this tale of masculinity through the perspective of someone who was there enough to buy in but also licensed to scoff and call bullshit when she wants to. A male narrator would surely get caught up in romantic notions of bikers nobly living by a code, but Kathy dismisses it as just making up a bunch of dumb rules all the time to feel important. In one scene she repeatedly interrupts her story to complain about too many bikes being parked on her grass, so she’s a uniquely qualified narrator.

Otherwise this is very dude-heavy, and it’s one of those movies that comes along every couple of years where holy shit, what a parade of great character actors and hot shit newcomers we have here. The headliners are Tom Hardy (CAPONE) as Vandals founder Johnny and Austin Butler (THE DEAD DON’T DIE) as his wildest protege (and Kathy’s husband) Benny, but also you got Nichols regular Michael Shannon (JONAH HEX), a guy from Justified (Damon Herriman), a guy from Justified: City Primeval (Boyd Holbrook), a guy from BLADE II (Norman Reedus, who probly wasn’t even cast, just drove up on his motorcycle and was suddenly in the movie), a guy from the ROAD HOUSE remake (Beau Knapp), a guy from THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES (Emory Cohen), a guy from THE NEON DEMON (Karl Glusman), a guy from COLD IN JULY (Happy Anderson), and Will Oldham (WENDY AND LUCY) as a bartender.

It seems to me pretty common for a hot shit ensemble period gang movie to end up underwhelming people; see MOBSTERS or GANGSTER SQUAD or BLACK MASS (though I’ll probly like that one when I see it) or some might say PUBLIC ENEMIES. Reedus was already in DEUCES WILD. I was prepared for this to be one of those because honestly I just wanted to see Hardy doing a Chicago accent and nasally voice muttering at these dudes. But I’m happy to have found that it’s that and more.

Kathy knows the stories of how things went down, repeats the ones she believes, but doesn’t seem invested in the mythmaking. For example, in a key scene she says she heard Johnny got the idea for the club from seeing THE WILD ONE on TV. We get to see him in his living room one day after work, being awed by Brando, repeating a cool line, trying to imitate him. When his wife (Rachel Lee Kolis) asks “What?” he says “nothing” and shrinks down. Throughout the movie we only occasionally see Johnny at home, but we hear that he responsibly holds down a job as a truck driver. I guess his wife is out with him sometimes but we never know what she thinks of all this.

And then there’s Benny. The only guy Kathy doesn’t think is a loser when she’s first dragged to the biker bar. She still tries to get rid of him but he gives her a ride home, stays outside the house overnight and all day until her boyfriend gets pissed off and leaves her. She marries Benny five weeks later.

He’s also the only one not scared to wear his Vandals vest when he’s out by himself. Gets his foot nearly chopped off over it but doesn’t give too much of a fuck. The thing is, most of the others are normal guys who like motorcycles and hanging out at bars acting tough, so they decided to do this thing and make themselves into these guys. But Benny really is that guy, the guy they wish they could be. Johnny wants Benny to inherit leadership of the club because he doesn’t give a fuck. Same reason he says no. There’s a very not-subtle homo-erotic current to it that we can take literally or not, but Johnny and Kathy spend the movie fighting over Benny.

Like GOODFELLAS or BOOGIE NIGHTS or DAWN OF THE DEAD you got your fun times where everybody’s being crazy and doing what they do but eventually there’s a turning point where they’ve pushed things too far and/or times have changed and the inevitable collapse happens. For THE BIKERIDERS the big shift is when the club starts to grow too much and they start getting new members who took them too literally. Or guys who are back from Vietnam, with addictions, traumas and killing experience. That changes things real quick. Even before that there’s a great subplot about the next generation coming along and assuming the Vandals are for real. I love the way this character “The Kid” sees them drive by while he’s stealing hubcaps, and it’s like he saw Superman. Or Marlon Brando. The camera tells us The Kid is gonna be important and then each time he briefly appears again there’s a little more progress toward becoming like the Vandals, or what he thinks they’re like. But also he seems to have more of a chip on his shoulder each time.

The actor who plays The Kid is named Toby Wallace, it was killing me trying to place where I knew him from, but it was the great Australian movie THE ROYAL HOTEL. He’s got a scary/enigmatic charisma in that one too.

As foretold in prophecy there are great performances all around, and Hardy can still delight me with single syllables. He tries to break up a fight just by standing between the two people and muttering, “Nah. Nah.” Meanwhile Butler smolders with that strange quality he has of being both meticulously prepared and straight up born to do this. Like, he probly spent months analyzing the psychology of the character in ways we’d never fathom but also could’ve just walked onto the set pouting and batting his eyelashes and made people feel exactly the same envy and fascination Johnny feels for Benny.

But the biggest standout might actually be Comer, the lead and top billed actor, doing an accent and voice and a really funny conversational style branching off into little tangents. Would deserve some nominations but you know how those biker wives always get a raw deal.

A subtle way this creates its own world is by not using the same old songs to evoke the period. There’s lots of good not-obvious soul and blues music playing throughout – Gary U.S. Bonds, Bill Justis, Magic Sam. They do use “Mannish Boy,” which I know I’ve heard in other movies dealing with questions of masculinity, but I like that they use the version from Electric Mud. The one where Marshall Chess convinced Muddy Waters to go psychedelic. Apparently controversial at the time, but easy to love now.

One odd touch I liked, but it’s a SPOILER: there’s a whole thing where a beloved member of the club dies suddenly, and it really crushes them all. Then they learn that the deceased’s parents won’t accept the flowers they sent. They all show up for the memorial and and line up like Marines in front of the church, but the parents spit on Johnny and tell him off. What I find really interesting though is that it wasn’t gang stuff the killed their son. He was just driving and a car came out of nowhere and he crashed. It would be good drama anyway but I like that they’re rejecting the entire motorcycle life, not just the bad parts.

Although this is partly the story of those bad parts taking over the life, I think the central tragedy of THE BIKERIDERS (spoiler) is Benny. He’s the only one of the original members who truly doesn’t give a fuck, who knows how to be totally free like they all picture themselves, but being that way makes it impossible for he and Kathy to be happy together. He constantly risks life and limb for no reason, prioritizes motorcycle shit over his marriage, really fucks up by leaving Kathy in a very dangerous situation while dealing with Vandals business, and also he’s such a tough guy he doesn’t know how to cry. A recipe for disaster. In the end Kathy seems to think they lived happily ever after, but it doesn’t seem to me he’d agree.

Some of Lyons’ photos are shown during the end credits, which is a pretty obvious thing to do, but as you see them and realize how the movie attempted to evoke them it feels like a real tribute to the original work. Lyon is still alive and was able to visit the set – he notes that the character isn’t at all like him, but he got emotional seeing them re-create one of his photos for the first time Kathy sees Benny. I read some good articles about him in relation to the movie, but strangely they don’t mention that he was the official photographer for one of the most significant groups in the civil rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was present at most of the historic moments they were involved in, even was roommates with John Lewis at some point, and it seems to me some of this must’ve overlapped with when he was getting to know the Outlaws? He says Hunter S. Thompson, who’d written a book about the Hell’s Angels, warned him against getting involved with the Outlaws. Instead he went as far as becoming an official member between 1966 and 1967, before becoming disillusioned with the club transforming into a criminal enterprise, as in the movie.

A sign that Nichols had something specific to say in his adaptation is that the Outlaws go back to the ‘40s, not some guy imitating Brando. According to Time, the idea of the movie comes from one line in the preface to the 2003 edition, about a leader named Johnny being challenged, and one chapter about Benny, as told by Kathy.

Nichols learned of the book from his musician brother Ben, who tried to get Lyon to let him use a photo for an album cover for his band Lucero. That didn’t work out but they did record a song called “Bikeriders,” also based on the Benny/Kathy chapter, and part of it plays on the end credits. You might think it’s a describing-the-plot song like in a Will Smith movie, but it’s actually from 20 years ago.

The dream of freedom Lyon saw in the biker clubs ultimately turned rancid, but there’s something beautiful about him documenting it with his art, in turn inspiring other works of art decades later. I would’ve been fine with just a good Tom Hardy showcase, but this is also a good movie.

Trivia: Stunt coordinator Freddie Poole has been Sylvester Stallone’s stunt double since BULLET TO THE HEAD and is action director for Tulsa King.