“The Bikeriders”: Melancholic Masculinity

Jeff Nichols’ period drama explores pantomimed masculinity through a photographer’s eye

Taking its name from the book by photographer Danny Lyon, The Bikeriders explores his eight-year period documenting the Vandals, a fictionalized Illinois motorcycle gang. Through the eyes of an outsider, director Jeff Nichols celebrates and memorializes the rise and fall of an archetypal era, as well as the larger-than-life iconography that lionizes it. 

Framed through interviews by Lyon’s fictionalized, nameless surrogate (Mike Faist), the first half of The Bikeriders is a story of contrasts: the grit of the gang juxtaposed against bleak stretches of highway and barren bridges; the stoicism of hypermasculinity paired with deep affection; chaos and noise captured in still, silent portraits. Every sequence is subtly framed from the perspective of both the bikers and the photographer — chaotic and shaky shots interspersed with carefully articulated compositions. 

Through the photographer’s interviews with Kathy Cross (Jodie Comer), we begin to understand the politics and dynamics of the Vandals as she explains her own integration into the gang after being drawn to Benny Cross (Austin Butler), an alluring member. As Kathy tells it, the Vandals seem to be something that appeared from nothing — born out of the allure of the aesthetics of Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, a dissatisfied working class seeking fulfillment, and the simple thrill of adrenaline. 

But the dissolution of this simplicity happens quickly, as the leader of the Vandals, Johnny (Tom Hardy) underestimates — and subsequently misuses — his own power. Whatever brought the gang into being, whether boredom or self-preservation, has been almost entirely erased, folding it once again into a broader paradigm of violence. The coolness of the Vandals disintegrates to an unflinching coldness. 

The cast of The Bikeriders finds success within the film’s enticing aesthetic translating the motion and depth captured in Lyon’s images. The Vandals ensemble deftly navigates the knife’s edge of pantomimed machismo and genuine vulnerability, as their hyper-masculinity is intense and contrived but also absolutely necessary to their self-preservation. Comer’s composed narration and Hardy’s self-possessed intensity both overshadow Butler’s performance, who cannot seem to find his footing beyond articulating his vapid identity.  

The collapse of the gang is told through a retrospective interview with Kathy, following the exodus of herself and Benny from the Vandals and its violent evolution. The camaraderie that had grounded the Vandals is crumbling, and anger replaces earnestness and brotherhood as a younger generation seeks to adopt the aesthetics of the gang. Though the Vandals were formed as an escape, the gang has been folded into the system that it sought refuge from, and its earlier, subversive iteration lingers somewhere between dream and myth, memorialized through memory and silent image.

OVERALL SCORE: 8/10

The Bikeriders was released on June 21, 2024 and is currently in US theaters and streaming on demand.