Jeff Nichols’s motorcycle movie is about a love triangle and a succession crisis – inspired by the immersive 1968 study of Chicago bikers by photojournalist Danny Lyon, whose black-and-white pictures flash up with the closing credits. This film opens up the storytelling throttle with a throaty growl, delivering the doomy romance of an old-fashioned western and the thrills of a mob drama.
The Bikeriders is set in a world in which the increasingly careworn gang leader competes for the affection of his toughest follower with this man’s girlfriend, while at the same time grooming him as his heir. Yet this is a group where the biker king – whatever his plans for a dauphin – can be challenged for the crown by any subordinate according to the rules of his own violence-democracy, the incumbent gruffly asking: fists or knives?
Tom Hardy is Johnny, truck-driver, family man and founding head honcho of the 60s Chicago motorbike club, The Vandals, inspired to form his gang after the ecstatic epiphany of watching Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones on TV; the film’s whole approach in laying out Johnny’s life circumstances is to imagine an answer to Brando’s famous reply to being asked what he’s rebelling against: what do you got?
His leather-clad guys and blacktop battlers have monikers like something from West Side Story: bleary draft-reject Zipco (Michael Shannon); beefy Cockroach (Emory Cohen); loyal lieutenant Brucie (Damon Herriman); California recruit Funny Sonny (Norman Reedus) and dependable footsoldiers Corky (Karl Glusman) and Wahoo (Beau Knapp).
