There aren’t a lot of good movies these days. Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders is the best new film since Todd Field’s Tár, which came out in 2022. The Bikeriders is set in the Chicago area in the mid-to-late sixties. It tells the story of the Vandals Motorcycle Club.
The movie is based on Danny Lyon’s book of photographs, also called The Bikeriders, about a real-life club called the Outlaws. Lyon also recorded interviews with the club, and some of the script is simply copied verbatim from Lyon’s tapes.
The Bikeriders stars Tom Hardy as Vandals founder Johnny Davis, Austin Butler as his young protégé Benny Cross, and Jodie Comer as Benny’s wife Kathy. The whole cast is good, but Jodie Comer is truly excellent. She deserves a whole shelfful of awards for this film. Austin Butler is also memorable as Benny: Laconic, Stoic, pure Nordic cool. The script is highly intelligent, the pacing never lags, and the cinematography is perfect for a gritty character study, meaning that it is unobtrusive. You are not reminded that you are “watching a movie.” You are simply allowed to become immersed in a story.
Since I want you to see this film, I will try not to include any spoilers, but I can give you some central themes. The Bikeriders can be described as a love triangle between Benny, Kathy, and the Vandals, particularly the leader Johnny, who sees Benny as a son and wants him to take over leadership.

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But the film is more than just a domestic drama. The Vandals are a Männerbund: a bonded male group of adventurers. It is a movie about masculinity and femininity in their most primal forms. Beyond that, it is movie about history, in a very Hegelian sense. Indeed, the story of the Vandals compresses the beginning, unfolding, and ending of history into a few years.
Before history, there are the family and economic life. Both spring from and are ruled by the necessities of satisfying basic animal needs. Johnny is a responsible man with a job, a wife, and two daughters. But he feels restless.
Motorcycles are his pastime, but when he creates the Vandals, it rapidly becomes something more: a Männerbund with a code of chivalry. The essence of chivalry or any other honor cult is that it subordinates animal desire to honor. When Benny first meets Kathy, he takes her for a ride, then drops her off at home. Then he parks his bike and waits the whole night outside. It is straight from a courtly romance. Johnny also allows anyone to challenge him to a fight for leadership. Fists or knives.
The Vandals gang also becomes political in the primal sense: a group with insiders arrayed against outsiders. It spawns imitators and rivals. When one of the Vandals is savagely beaten because he would rather die than take off his gang colors in a bar in a neighboring town, the gang assembles in force. Johnny asks the bar owner for the identity of the assailants, cooly dispatches some men to break their legs, then orders the bar burned to the ground. As the gang members watch the bar go up in flames, they notice that the police and firetrucks are waiting at a distance, afraid to come closer. It is exhilarating. A moment of real power. Yes, it is a criminal act, but it is not venal. It is an act of vengeance for a member of the gang.
But the seeds of the Vandals’ destruction have already been planted, partly by their virtues, partly by their vices. As the gang’s fame spreads, more people want to join. They attract increasingly creepy and sociopathic characters: juvenile delinquents, hardened criminals, Vietnam vets with post-traumatic stress disorder. From the start, the gang’s main pastime is getting drunk and smoking weed. Later, as the gang grows and the sixties deepen, tastes turn to heroin and meth. The turning point comes when the duel to the death over honor is replaced by simple, cowardly murder. Chivalry is dead, the gang becomes just a criminal operation, and the original members either die, leave, or get sucked into organized crime. History thus ends with a return to the rule of animal desire and economic necessity.
The Bikeriders has an almost entirely white cast. (There’s one Asian biker chick, but she didn’t feel forced in.) This is not, however, a shallow, sociological docudrama about working-class whites on motorcycles. That would bore me to tears. Instead, The Bikeriders is a genuinely tragic depiction of the fate of greatness of soul in a post-historical wasteland. It will move you deeply, because it is a genuinely deep film. Catch it while you can.
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8 comments
Excellent, terse review. I did not perceive some of this when watching the film. I enjoyed it, but more as a kind of “cine-realist” or anthropological foray into an American subculture (a huge bonus for me being that it was a subculture of whites, formed when the country was still very white, “only yesterday”: Joe Biden was a young college graduate and later law student during the era depicted) than any kind of grander philosophical meditation, most of the latter of which I completely missed. I did recognize the Mannerbund aspect, and the film’s more obviously being a morality tale, the Vandals’ inevitable corruption mirroring America’s “loss of innocence” across the Sixties (similar to one of the themes of the Godfather films: that Old World customs and blood + honor relationships are no match for the sin of greed allied to the acid of commercial modernity).
Two small racial observations. I assumed during viewing that the unobtrusive “Asian biker chick” was an American Indian – another ethnoculture outside the American mainstream, as well as one long associated in the American mythos with what is “wild” and “untamed”. And that would-be gangster who brought the gun to a knife fight did not look majority–white to me. Even as I watched the remainder of the film I was wondering whether that particular casting could possibly have been intended as a racial commentary of some kind, and what, in the director’s mind, that might have been.
I have not been to a theater to see a film since Joker, which was ok but flawed. Last masterpiece was Bladerunner 2049. I think my lady and I will see this on Friday.
Please let us know what you think.
Good review. And I agree with you that there are not a lot of good movies these days (2020 decade, so far). I will put this film on my watchlist. Thinking about a double feature with the 1953 biker film – The Wild One.
The Wild One gets a shout out in The Bikeriders.
Thank you for such a thoughtful review. I have more or less given up on current cinema and I wouldn’t have bothered with this film without your recommendation.
It’s on my list for when it’s available to stream. Sadly the cinemas where I live are far too vibrant and diverse to make attendance in person bearable.
I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating. For me personally, the very best thing about Counter-Currents is the way in which it offers introductions/recommendations to worthwhile literature and culture. I’m sure many of the other supporters feel the same way.
Thanks so much.
It´s a very good review indeed. The other option is to view the film as a tale about the lure of violence and anarchy. Johnny gets eaten alive by the powers that he has helped unleash, while Benny matures up and leaves the world of adolescent freedom and violence behind. He gets married and gets a regular job in Florida.
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