The Bikeriders
From the very first scene of ‘The Bikeriders’, director Jeff Nichols is making every effort to create an era. In an opening long shot composed through the door frame of a bar looking inside, Benny a biker is seen sitting at the bar with his back facing the camera. Two old men are seen nearing him and the camera moves in on them. They want him to take off his colors or his patches vest or get out of the bar. As Benny coolly registers their request, we also register his own or rather our own: we see the torn off fibers on his jacket, a patch with a skull on it that is typical for the Chicago Vandals motorcycle club etc and of course Butler’s chiseled features. Cigarette smokes spread around as it comes to Benny`s face: a tum of ed out towards his face fingers hot towards whiskey tumbler resting over his lips. “You’d have to kill me,” is what calm Benny says. It is a favour that these two men are eager to do. They drag him out from the premises to the road and beat him up. So taking out a knife from the boot Benny slashed a Man’s face. A one who being a sadist grinned on rugged features comes within from an axe on a back of his head. Freeze frame.
It’s a riveting episode breathtaking with unspoiled age detail which captures that of the society and that of a man.
When depicting Bikeriders, Nichols hits the mark for the film when the subject changes it then becomes, to put it bluntly somewhat of a two handed affair. Most of the criticism directed at Nichols about the roots of the Midwestern bike culture is addressed to him ‘the author’ who created this peculiar artifact. One of those films is called ‘Bikeriders’ and it has some simple style designed to encapsulate a time and atmosphere in two dimension long before it was ever achievement by the emotive experiences.
The first one goes as follows To begin with, it is clear that there is no apparent point of reference. To this, Nichols chooses Kathy (Jodie Comer) to be our way into this world. She first meets Lyon (Mike Faist) who manages to get her interviews on tape all through the movie, in a laundromat to discuss her in 1965. One such day, she remembers, her close friend pulled her out of the house into a bar owned by the Vandals. She came in with white Levis and a purple sweater, ordinary looking. This bar is populated with some ruffneck inrom what looks like leather and denim bike vests some without thier shirts some wearing ear rings, That chicky bar isn’t her scene. She feels like leaving until Benny catches her eye leaning against a pool table.
Scene shifts onwards but the slow step by step advance is that any person or that seeks any major shifts and all the minutes and all the shots and the angles and movements are remembered and visualized in detail. For Kathy, as for the audience, a sense of attraction emerges akin to that of like and what Benny stands for.
But Kathy is a typical emigrant to this nation, dazed by its order, customs and politics. We learn very little about her other than she inhabits an ordinary Midwest brick town house alongside a working class man, who as it turns out, Benny scares away when he parks his bike inside their house one night. In no time, Kathy introduced us with the remaining of the club members, including the reasonable Brucie (Damon Herriman), the car nut Cal (Boyd Holbrook), a steamed Latvian who wants to go to Vietnam and is called Zipco (Michael Shannon), a bug eaters called Cockroach (Emory Cohen) and many more. She also remembers how Johnny (Tom Hardy) told her about his gang and said that he got inspired to create a gang after watching “The Wild One” with Marlon Brando and the real reason why the club evolved from his pure interest in bikes. But then, Johnny who has a suburban home, a desk job that we never see, along with a wife and two kids is somewhat akin to some of the other gentlemen that were introduced with their several yet very beautiful images and speaking directly to the audience.
He is looking for family and the American postwar quintessence of a suburban house with a white fence is of no significance to him. Like Kathy, he believes that he has found the solution to the liberty he desires in Benny who is ever ready to defend his brothers even if it means going against Indiana bikers without seeking for further explanation.
The strongest parts of “The Bikeriders” are those that allow us o see this low culture through the eyes of Benny and Kathy. Compared to the Vandals’ members, these are younger and therefore have different aspirations and needs. Following this couple, we see what the Vandals transform from a bunch of such wannabe rebels with no real cause, only dressed up for nuisance from the monotony of daily routines, into the domestic motorcycle club that has chapters all over the Midwest. By themselves, these guys are cowards; as a unit however they charge as a pride, sharing laughter, strategies and emotions. Dramatic images of hot buzzing powerful motorbikes racing through the tranquil countryside illustrate the struggle between the masculine image the men try to portray and the quiet personas whom they try to conceal behind the characters they display.
That’s how Nichols visualizes this romance in the history of motoring subcultures in the first half an hour of the film, set to ‘50’s music.
However, it is proving rather difficult for him to attempt to lay this digression soldiers suffering from PTSD upon returning home from Vietnam and the peasant style youth how the attention shifts from Kathy and Benny to Johnny and Kathy. Hardy makes an effort to get to the difficulties that are swarming in Johnny through the hunching of his posture and the strained lines on his face, but Comer is far behind. It is not only that her Midwest accent seems so self conscious (this cast is each trying their own regionally specific takes but with disappointing effects) rather, she is a caricature, a distraction who takes away from the emotionality of many scenes by her bare presence. Once more, it is not perturbing because her character is poorly written. There are far too few scenes between Kathy and Benny, what is their married life really like, exactly? The Vietnam War is also an undeveloped extension of the story. Even if there are veterans biker in the pictures afterward, dominating this transformative than addicting pack love, The bikers would ride through beautifully architected Midwestern residential areas with lofty houses. There are no recruitment posters or any such soldiers. Therefore, no servicemen on the corners of the streets where men had once stood ushering in the draft.
It seems clear the director seeks to draw parallels between the war and the non-combatants, and it’s most recently used Toby Wallace’s sinister character, but that goes only a bit further than surface level.
As a disclaimer, I consider myself a fairly lukewarm fan of the Bikeriders movie when it comes out Butler’s role. Perhaps this was so after having witnessed the dramatic portrayal of a mythic figure, Elvis, I was not exactly keen on seeing him play a this time around, a biker. Only the second time viewing did he command the moment. The camera appreciates him and he has the skills to position himself toward the light so that it can play through his brow and down his face to sweeten, restrain, to dull his sexiness sad eye appealing desperation, and vulnerability. He handles effectively, all the further exposed masculinity that interests Nichols so much. The group is not only deprived of its aura when he walks out of the scene, but the entire movie as well. Once again, Nichols does not come up with any means of recapturing one’s attention because the plotline, the characters have various round features, but are badly developed as clones of the figures in Lyons’ photographs, which unfortunately do not magnetize any of their audience towards them.
The second half of the film, which largely features a robust absence of Butler, does not turn into yet another sweeping ode to the age gone when things were rather better. There are virtually no emotions left and there are images depicting impersonal actors in random outfits. Maybe that artifice works in some way, because it is not hard to see that this is a film about men who, at a particular point of time, decided to be actors of counterculture movement rather than accept the mirage of the American dream. However, without a Butler type to direct ones towards, the film becomes too bland and loose and too disappointingly springs none of the saddened waters of Dali for whatever when this period wished to bring back. And it only just barely orients itself on the timeline preceeding the ‘Easy Rider’. As the innocence is evaporated, ‘The Bikeriders,’ which would bravely fade away, would also be lost.
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