The Bikeriders Is Basically Bikefellas , but in a Good Way

Kyle Kaplan/Courtesy of Focus Features

The usual way of ripping off Martin Scorsese is to cop his flash, even if—or especially if—that results in the lesser movie Scorsese himself has been accused of making, one that glamorizes hoods and glories in violence with a killer soundtrack. (The other way of ripping off Martin Scorsese is to make an unrelated crime movie and have viewers claim some dubious connection because it uses voiceover or dark comedy.) In The Bikeriders, director Jeff Nichols finds a different way in. To call the movie a Scorsese ripoff would be reductive, as well as counterintuitive; Nichols' past films (see Mud, Shotgun Stories, or Take Shelter) have more in common with the Southern decay of David Gordon Green, and he doesn’t really traffic in sensation, or in Catholic guilt. But his new film owes an unmistakable debt to Goodfellas—in the macho camaraderie that so many Scorsese imitators strive for, and in the layered cultural referentiality so many of them miss.

The Bikeriders is loosely based on a photography book of the same name by Danny Lyon, the product of four years Lyon spent rolling with motorcycle gang members in the mid-1960s. In the movie, Mike Faist plays Lyon, who frames the story through interviews, mostly with Kathy (Jodie Comer), wife of the brooding and charismatic Benny (Austin Butler), a perpetual second-in-command who Johnny (Tom Hardy) hopes will someday take over their Chicago-area club, the Vandals. The movie resembles the book in that, despite Kathy’s narration, there isn’t really an easy-to-chart story of the bikers’ rise and fall. The boys get together out of mutual interest in riding bikes, and eventually get crowded out as the group expands, and their hobby becomes more popular (and more overtly criminal.) It’s sort of like when the mob gets into drug-dealing in countless gangster movies, except the Vandals, despite their fearsome image and propensity for brutal fights with others and amongst themselves, are coming from a gentler place. For much of the movie, they’re essentially throwing rowdy family picnics, with wives and kids in tow.

Kathy’s narration reflects that. Goodfellas and Casino depend on multi-track narration to offer different points of view on various criminal and interpersonal enterprises, but with Kathy providing the primary narrative voice here, it’s like watching Goodfellas as reconstructed only by Lorraine Bracco’s character, who speaks up only after we’ve lived with Ray Liotta’s iconic voiceover for a while. The Bikeriders doesn’t use Comer’s commentary to reveal the secret feminist power behind the Vandals, and in fact the movie includes plenty of scenes that Kathy would have only known about secondhand, well after the fact, or perhaps not at all. It’s hard to say how much Kathy is hearing, because from what we see of him, Benny barely seems to talk to anyone, including the woman he marries after knowing her just a few weeks. Without his input, Kathy delivers what she can: a winding, anecdotal story heavier on hangout vibes than cause-and-effect propulsion.

Nichols isn’t going for Scorsese’s kineticism, but he captures an underdiscussed storytelling quirk of his forebear’s crime pictures, up to and including the recent Killers of the Flower Moon, which often tell the story of vast criminal empires through the accumulation of colorful underworld yarns, some funny and some horrifying. In The Bikeriders, the lead characters aren’t involved in any big jobs or sketchy deals to serve as markers in their lives—to the point where their source of income is an ongoing mystery. In a pivotal scene that opens the movie before the perfect freeze-frame interrupts it and saves the resolution for later, Benny refuses to remove his “colors” (his Vandals jacket) in a bar and receives a vicious beating, which is then answered with, well, large-scale retribution. It’s all personal; it’s all lifestyle.

This is an atmosphere where character-actor faces and movie-star handsomeness jostle together, sometimes in the same role, without revealing the full breadth of any single person’s life. Characters played by Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus, Will Oldham, Damon Herriman (Dewey Crowe from Justified), and Michael Shannon (who has appeared in every Nichols movie so far) have obvious vibes—Shannon can get a big laugh just by turning up and looking particularly raffish —but light backstory. They come across more like people from photographs as opposed to characters in a feature film.

But as with Scorsese, feature films do loom over The Bikeriders, as the mystique of the Vandals and biker culture bleed into the mainstream. Early on, Hardy’s Johnny is seen rapt at a TV broadcast of The Wild One, starring a young Marlon Brando; later, we hear that one of the bikers got a gig posted outside a movie theater, trying to entice patrons to come check out Easy Rider. That’s the journey of the movie in miniature: from the alluring mystique of images offering escape from workaday realities to trendy commodity, from pop culture to counterculture back to pop again. It doesn’t much matter that Easy Rider would probably be seen as the more realistic biker picture compared to the Brando movie from a decade earlier; there’s still that symbiosis between movie-world fantasy and harsh reality. It's a phenomenon that seems to linger in Scorsese’s mind, too: Think of that final sequence in Goodfellas, with the shot of Liotta in his “shnook” suburban tract interrupted by Pesci shooting straight at the camera, a direct homage to the last shot of The Great Train Robbery; or, more recently, the ending of Killers of the Flower Moon, in which the atrocities we’ve just seen are reduced to true-crime “history.”

That interplay, including Nichols’ ability to bring out the dusky beauty amidst all that noise and exhaust, holds The Bikeriders together when the story itself threatens to wander off into vague self-mythologizing. Hardy and Butler are perfectly cast for precisely their ability to imperfectly compete with icons of the past. Butler became famous for playing Elvis Presley—and as brilliant as he was there, his presence as the ghostly center of The Bikeriders depends on a certain try-hard affect beneath the unaffected, taciturn cool. Somehow he can play both: The kid who’s going after a certain image with youthful, stubborn conviction, and the immovable man who’s made those convictions his own. Though Hardy is more established than his younger costar, with years of experience playing up his marbled eccentricities, his reputation remains tied up in a performative sensibility, with all of those self-invented accents that exist primarily in his mouth.

Those extratextual dimensions are also what allows The Bikeriders to step away from Scorsese pastiche, even as it absorbs his influence more organically and provocatively than so many imitators, and take its place on a recent spectrum of movies burrowing into ’50s and ’60s iconography, attempting to figure out what makes them tick. Butler did it in Elvis, the same year that Marilyn Monroe received a controversially bleak yet maximalist treatment in Blonde, and though The Bikeriders doesn’t carry the same tragic weight (or, thankfully, the doomy portent), it does feel like a tangent launched from roughly the same period, even though it’s not actually about Brando or any other image-makers. True to its roots, it feels like a biopic of the images themselves.

Originally Appeared on GQ