Review: Bad Accent Aside, Tom Hardy Shines in The Bikeriders

Throughout the 1960s, Danny Lyon, the famed photojournalist who documented the civil rights movement as a part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), turned his lens on another marginalized group: biker gangs. He followed around members of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club and documented and demystified their lives, even at one point becoming a member. Some of these photos, published in a book called The Bikeriders, were on display recently at the Margulies Collection in Wynwood. They are evocative and intense, speaking to the freedom and joy the members of these groups felt within them, a contrast to sensationalized portrayals in Hollywood films like Easy Rider and The Wild One with Marlon Brando.

Both of those films cameo in director Jeff Nichols' new film adaptation of The Bikeriders, a movie that wears its inspirations on its leather sleeves. It's evident from the very beginning, as Benny (Austin Butler), a member of the fictional Vandals biker club in Chicago, gets in a vicious brawl with two thugs who demand he take off his club jacket. "You'll have to kill me to get these colors off my back," he tells them before they drag him outside. There's a knife flash and a shovel slammed into the back of Benny's head. As the frame freezes just before Benny gets struck with the digging implement, we hear his wife, Kathy (Jodie Comer), complain in narration that she should never have gotten involved with those "nothing but trouble" biker boys, just as a classic soul tune hits the needle on the soundtrack.

It is an obvious — perhaps too obvious — reversal of the iconic opening of Goodfellas, in which Henry Hill opines, "I always wanted to be a gangster." Kathy did not actually want to be a biker's old lady, as she explains repeatedly throughout the film, serving as its narrator via a framing device that sees her interviewed by a fictional Danny Lyon (Mike Faist of Challengers). She's a reluctant member of this world thanks to her marriage to Benny, who she spots in the Outlaws' biker bar/clubhouse while meeting a friend and marries three weeks later. Again, another Goodfellas callback: Kathy is essentially Karen, Henry's wife, yet she possesses none of the attributes that made Karen a strong character. She doesn't seem especially attracted to Benny — Comer and Butler have miserable chemistry and feel completely mismatched — and aside from her narratorial duties, she spends most of the film trying to pry her husband away from the club, tearily threatening to leave him, and other clichés. At least Karen could admit to herself that her gangster husband turned her on, and she wasn't afraid to pull a gun herself to get what she wanted. An obnoxious, put-on Chicagoland accent also weakens her character's impact.
For his part, Butler also fails to convince as a badass biker. The actor has been lauded for his ability to disappear into roles, transforming into Elvis Presley for Baz Luhrmann's larger-than-life 2022 biopic of the rock star and the villainous psychopath Feyd-Rautha in this year's Dune: Part Two. Here, he barely feels present. His part is thin, and his performance is inexpressive. His personality and backstory are deliberately left a mystery, which causes unneeded distance from the audience. He's supposedly the gang's true renegade, a crazy-ass loose cannon who can't be fucked with, but the worst we see him do is get into that bar fight and lead the cops on a chase that ends when he runs out of gas. Maybe his good looks are part of the problem — some of the bikers Lyon photographed were handsome but in an earthy, weathered way. Butler looks like he belongs in a boyband, not a biker gang.

And then there's Tom Hardy, perfectly cast as the Vandals' founder, Johnny. Or he would be if not for one critical choice the actor makes in his performance. Hardy has taken a little too much inspiration from Brando, adopting an absolutely outrageous accent for the part. He sounds like Mel Blanc playing a gangster in a classic Looney Tunes short. It is distracting, ridiculous, and difficult to understand with lots of Brando-style mumbling and slurred speech, and I don't think the distinctiveness is enough to make it work like his take on Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

Still, ignore the accent, and Hardy gives a powerful performance. Johnny, a gainfully employed truck driver and blue-collar family man who starts the club after seeing Brando in The Wild One on TV, is the true heart and soul of the film, and his arc is tragic. Originally founding the club as a band of fellow working-class misfits who just wanted to ride motorcycles and hang out, he loses control of the outfit as it gains notoriety and descends into violence. Johnny is soft-spoken and affectionate with his boys, yet tough when it's demanded. In an early scene, one of the other members disputes his decision to reject a prospective Milwaukee chapter and challenges him to fight for leadership of the club. "Fists or knives?" he replies with gruff simplicity. He wins the brutal fistfight and lets the new branch join anyway, dominance asserted.
As the film goes on, however, Johnny becomes increasingly disturbed and haunted by the increasing violence in the club. After Benny's fight leads to an injury that could rob him of his ability to ride, Johnny commands the bar, which happens to be burned down. When the cops arrive, he doesn't make the bikers flee — the police are afraid of them. The club attracts members enticed not by the freedom of motorcycling but by the power and fear the bikers commands. A divide opens between "beer drinkers and pot smokers," with the latter newcomers populated by disturbed Vietnam vets whose drug habits, in fact, skew harder than mere grass. We see Johnny's sorrow and worry crack his stoic, masculine façade, especially when confronted with the death of a close comrade in a car wreck. At the funeral, the club lines up in an honor guard outside; the parents of the deceased walk by and spit in Johnny's face. Later, he chastises members for dreaming of dying on their bikes — such carnage deserves no romanticism. It all becomes too much, and Johnny pleads with Benny, battling with Kathy throughout the film for influence over him, to take his place at the top. The Vandals are truly becoming a biker gang, and he knows when the new blood eventually challenges him, it won't be with fists.

Nichols, who wrote the film in addition to directing and whose previous work includes Take Shelter and Midnight Special, clearly has a lot of care for this setting. He fills the gang with crunchy characters but also imbues them with humanity. Zipco (Michael Shannon), the Vandals' perennially dirt-coated Pig-Pen, harbors regrets over his failure to enlist for the Vietnam War draft, jealous of "pinkos" like his clean-cut brother. Cockroach (Emory Cohen), whose nickname comes from his perverse love of getting bugs in his teeth while riding, secretly dreams of getting paid to ride as a motorcycle cop. And Funny Sonny (Norman Reedus), a Hells Angels-type from California with wavy hair and horrifying teeth, rides in to bust up one of the Vandals for defecting and joins them instead. Nichols shoots some segments in a documentary style and, like the real Lyon, focuses much more on these characters and their stories and motivations, assuming the audience won't care about what makes a Harley roar. Yet if the intricacies and details of its rich setting are where The Bikeriders succeeds, it's the conventional character conflicts and questionable decisions made by its leads that make the movie run out of gas.

The Bikeriders. Starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, and Tom Hardy. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols. 116 minutes. Rated R. Check for showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/movietimes.