Austin Butler biker film hits the road running but lacks grunt

3 Stars

The clean-cut image of the all-American boy didn't stand much chance in popular culture when motorcycle riders in jeans, t-shirts and leather jackets roared onto the screen. Perhaps it was already beginning to fade at the time Marlon Brando hit the cinema in The Wild One in 1953, but when Peter Fonda cruised along through the American South on his Harley-Davidson in Easy Rider 16 years later, the counterculture was well under way, and the wholesome masculine ideal long gone.

It's a brave filmmaker who decides to tell a story that takes place between two such iconic motorbike riders, but here it is.

This is the latest work from Texan writer-director Jeff Nichols whose first feature Shotgun Stories set the standard on a highly regarded filmmaking career. Bikeriders, set within a chapter of a fictitious motorcycle club called the Vandals, is based on the early years of the Outlaws, one of the biggest motorcycle clubs in existence.

Photojournalist Danny Lyon who recorded the Outlaws bikers in their early days in Chicago, is the author of the book of the same name on which this film is based. Lyon appears as the character holding mike and camera, Danny (Mike Faist), as he conducts his research in 1973.

The Bikeriders takes shape as a series of interviews, one of them conducted amusingly in a laundromat, with Kathy (Jodie Comer). As partner to Benny, a hothead who Vandals leader Johnny (Tom Hardy, of Mad Max) has decided should be his successor when the time comes, she was witness to it all from the inside. As Benny, a brooding figure who is never really explained, Austin Butler (Elvis) is of course the movie's poster-boy.

It goes without saying that the film recreates an intensely blokey world, with no space for gender equity or multicultural diversity. To my mind, this suggests a subject with a lot of potential for insight into an intriguing monolithic community.

To take us on the journey, we are guided by a female voice. An astute decision to frame it this way, with Comer, an actor who stole the show as the alluring assassin in the TV series Killing Eve, telling the story. Though the Liverpudlian actor seems an odd casting choice for a road movie set in the American Midwest, she is completely convincing in the role of a biker wife with a bit of steel within.

The night she and Benny meet there is mutual attraction and he gives her lift home, then literally camps on her doorstep. In a few weeks she becomes his wife, but when he leaves and returns, it doesn't seem to impact her sense of self too gravely. She is disguised by the weird fashions of the day, but despite the beehive hair and Cleopatra eyeliner, she is no ditsy gal.

That pillion ride home amongst a phalanx of bikers along the open road had a big impact. It was Kathy's entrée to the intoxicating freedom on the open road, when she saw past Benny's less lovable sides, and understood why the low growl of his Harley Davidson and being among the Vandals meant just about everything to him.

I get the bit about riding pillion, especially with such an excellent soundtrack stoking rebellion from artists including Cream, The Animals and Nichols' musician siblings. But Benny's drive for biker outlaw status remains a mystery to me. There isn't much backstory offered on any of the other motorcycle club members either, with the glaring exception of Kid (Toby Wallace), a 20-year-old who violently restrains his father during an incident of domestic violence.

In the years between Wild One and Easy Rider, the counterculture stepped in, of course. Introducing Vietnam vets and drug users into a biker scene where many were fairly regular working-class guys with jobs, homes and wives. They had had their issues but liked to wear leathers and clear out of suburbia on their bikes on the weekend. Differences of opinion were sorted out with fists and knives, however those provocative badges make the case a bit less convincing.

The Bikeriders holds a kind of journalistic distance from visceral engagement in the lure of the open road and there isn't the grunt I had hoped for, but the performances, the production qualities and soundtrack are top gear.