‘They ride, they drink, they get dangerous’: the blazing film inspired by the Hells Angels’ biggest rivals | Film

Aanyone less like a Hells Angel would be hard to imagine. Yet Jeff Nichols—that genial, soft-spoken director, with his rosy face and modest wavy hair streaked with silver—is responsible for The Bikeriders, a film full of roaring engines and the smell of grease. Inspired by photographer Danny Lyon’s 1967 book of the same name, it stars Tom Hardy as Johnny, the aging leader of a Chicago biker gang; Austin Butler as Benny, his coolest member; and Jodie Comer as Kathy, who has a crush on Benny. Lyon rides with and profiles the Outlaws, but Nichols invented the gang, renaming them the Vandals to avoid aggro from the real-life subjects.

“Becoming an Outlaws historian wasn’t my goal,” explains the 45-year-old filmmaker, sitting in front of a wall of books and knick-knacks in his home in Austin, Texas. “Making them up has become the safest approach.” These guys aggressively protect their colors, their emblem, so I didn’t want to offend them. They are the second largest motorcycle gang in the world after the Hells Angels. So if they were only ranked sixth or seventh, maybe it would be different? “I’m not saying that,” he laughs. “Let everyone be there and I’ll stay here in my own space.”

Lyon described his book as an attempt to record and celebrate the life of the American biker, but Nichols has a different approach. “I wouldn’t use the term ‘celebrate.’ The first hour is meant to be romantic, for sure. Although there is violence, we are having fun: we invite the audience in. Once you get to the second half, the music recedes, the voice-over goes away, and the realities of the choices these people have made start to be taken seriously.”

This voiceover is one of the most impressive elements of The Bikeriders. In a film that’s shoulder-to-shoulder leather with whiskey-drinking, brawling, motorcycle-revving beasts, it’s nothing short of radical to assign narrative duties to a woman. It’s Cathy being interviewed by Danny (Mike Feist) on a tape machine in moments that deliberately put some distance between the audience and the bikers. Lorraine Bracco was only entrusted to narrate a few scenes in Goodfellas, but The Bikeriders is driven by Cathy’s skeptical point of view.

“I wish I could say it’s a haughty thing,” Nichols says. “You know, ‘It’s time for a woman to narrate this man’s movie!'” That idea was not lost on me. But the truth was that Cathy was the most interesting voice in the book. She is self-deprecating, introspective, maddening at times, but also cheerful and sincere. Although the boys like her, she is still an outsider because she is a woman. That makes her the perfect lens through which to see this hyper-masculine situation.”

Comer proved more than a match for Hardy in their scenes together. Cathy, fighting with Johnny over her suitor, confronts him in an electrifying battle, warning him that Benny will die if he continues to ride with the Vandals. “When two actors go up against each other in a scene, I always ask them, ‘Who wants to go first?’” Jodie came in and her pace was bam-bam-bam! She tries to do the scene quickly and Tom’s reaction is to slow down immediately. Eventually she asked me, “Can you tell him to speed up?” But it was much more frustrating that way. Oh man, that scene was awesome! Tom turned to me after the first take and said, “Damn, she’s something else.”

The three leads form a strange love triangle. Benny is silently handsome, to be sure, with Butler channeling a snarling, feline sexiness from his Oscar-nominated performance in Elvis. But Johnny doesn’t want to sleep with Benny, Nichols insists: he does be him. “He wants it. He would like to devour it. I knew it wouldn’t be overtly homosexual: that would be oversimplifying it. But there is something there. Tom is wearing this leather jacket, and underneath he’s also wearing a leather vest that’s tight. He’s obviously a total ripped guy, so every time he moves, you’re going to hear it creeeak. You can’t escape that sound – it infuses the scenes with sexuality.”

When Nichols made his last film, Loving, about the real-life relationship that overturned America’s laws against interracial marriage in 1967, he said, “The two things Americans don’t want to deal with are race and gender.” The Bikeriders didn’t none of the two. Motorcycle classics like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless are filled with eroticism, while Nichols’ picture seems chaste. When he tells me that the real Benny and Cathy had a son, I’m blown away: there’s no evidence in the film that they even had sex.

“It was a note from a studio that came up,” he recalls. “Someone said, ‘Do we ever see them kiss?’ And we don’t. It hadn’t occurred to me because the rest of it—Cathy and Benny at the bar, then her on the back of his motorcycle—is so loaded. But I do i think there’s a lot of sexuality there, even though we don’t have people beating around the bush.

Let’s agree to disagree on this one. What the film is certainly good at is subtly undermining the tough guys. Benny himself remains enigmatic, even nebulous. “Danny never interviewed him. And although there are three pictures of Benny in the book, you never see his face. He’s sort of mythologized. Cathy talks about him and has newspaper clippings about how he ran all those stop signs. The film asks, “Is this guy really a badass—or do we just want him to be?”

For all its violence, though, I wonder if The Bikeriders isn’t guilty of whitewashing. Lyon reported that one of the robbers had “unrolled a huge Nazi flag like a picnic rug,” but the vandals showed no such objectionable tendencies. “I was more interested in how something like this gets started,” Nichols says. “It’s usually a social club for people who don’t think they belong in the mainstream. They hang out, ride bikes, drink beer. It becomes something more formalized and ultimately more dangerous. I asked Danny what this Nazi stuff was all about. I had read that these boys’ fathers had served in the war and that was “Fuck you” to them. Danny’s response was, “They weren’t that smart. They just thought it looked cool and wanted to shock.”

What does he think about where male-oriented groups are today: the rancid male enclaves of insel culture or Andrew Tate’s followers? “Oh man,” he sighs. “It’s weird that chat forums and the internet are expanding these communities when it’s probably just three dudes drinking beer and going, ‘This sucks.'” Take the proud guys. I’m sure there was some unifying discontent, but I doubt the idea of ​​storming the US Capitol was on their minds when they first got together. I think it’s human nature to want to be a part of something. We want to find an identity.

Nichols has always been drawn to stories about “people who feel like they don’t belong in the mainstream, so they move out.” This idea defines his 2011 film Take Shelter, in which his regular collaborator Michael Shannon plays a presumably deranged man protecting his family from the impending apocalypse; or Cal, with Matthew McConaughey as a fugitive who befriends two teenage girls. What The Bikeriders demonstrates is how even the most rebellious subcultures develop their own orthodoxies.

“Identity is such a big topic today,” he says. “Everyone finds their own unique identity, whether it’s race, gender or sexuality. We are all searching for our own story. What’s strange to me is that in the pursuit of that you wrap yourself in these groups and then by definition they have to start coming up with rules and structures. Before you know it, those people who felt they didn’t want to live by society’s rules are now living by a different set of rules. As humans, we are susceptible to this. I find it pretty scary.

He witnessed this himself growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas. “It’s a relatively small town in the American South, but we had a thriving local punk rock scene. I learned to play the drums and was in a few bad punk bands, but what I remember is that it felt like ours. None of us did it to become famous. Our agenda was clear. But then punk as an idea in Arkansas started to formalize and the rules were enforced: “This is punk, that’s not. You’re not punk rock enough. And why are you wearing that polo shirt?”

He smiles, perhaps realizing that’s what he’s wearing today. “Then you find yourself walking around the mall and Green Day is playing over the speakers. Then you realize, “Well, I guess it’s not ours anymore.”