The Bikeriders

Grade: C

The Bikeriders is exactly what I was afraid it would be. I’d been seeing the trailer since last year, and I held out hope and open-mindedness that they’d somehow pull it off, and bring texture and freshness to a period movie about motorcycle gangs. I even tried to trick myself into appreciating it, by imagining it as a cinematic representation of an early Bruce Springsteen epic about rivaling gangs (like Jungleland, Incident on 57th Street, or Zero and Blind Terry). No luck. The Bikeriders is silly, shallow, derivative, and dated.

The women in the movie (not that we see much of them) are from Grease. The men are straight out of West Side Story and Jersey Boys. Almost none of them are as fleshed-out or compelling as any character in those musicals. The Bikeriders does have a cast member from Spielberg’s West Side Story: Mike Faist, who played Riff, and was recently in Challengers. He is wasted here, as a reporter/interviewer. He would have been a welcome addition as one of the bikers – any of them. Instead, he is reduced to pointing a microphone and asking questions. There’s a series of interviews and scenes from 1965 to 1973 about a Chicago-based motorcycle gang. British actress Jodie Comer (from Free Guy), as the eventual wife of a biker played by Austin Butler (Oscar-nominated for the title character in Elvis) provides information to Faist’s journalist. She acts and sounds like she’s auditioning for Rizzo or Frenchy or Jan. It’s a very good accent, but all I got from her in this film was a great character voice.

A movie podcast I listen to often plays a “if you had to nominate anything from this film…” game. I wouldn’t, here, but if I must, Tom Hardy (as Johnny, the leader) comes the closest to consistently giving us an interesting, compelling character with an arc. He takes the lead in my favorite scene. A handful of young guys come up to Johnny and ask to join. Just one of them speaks for everyone. Hardy as Johnny says “sure, you’re in, but just you. You have to leave your friends behind.” The boy almost doesn’t hesitate, and starts to approach, and Johnny comes down hard on him. “Get back with your guys and get outta here! What kind of piece of shit are you – wanting to walk away from your friends so quickly?!?” It’s, in a weird way, a touching lesson about solidarity with your comrades. Your literal ride-or-dies, if you will.

The rest isn’t as effective. A stacked cast that also includes Michael Shannon and Norman Reedus all do the wiseguy Goodfellas on bikes thing. The movie ends with Comer recapping for Faist what ended up happening to everyone. It plays suspiciously and mechanically like pre-credits epilogue captions. As she talks about each guy, we are shown their individual faces. I was almost grateful for that, because it helped me remember who they were. We have the usual smoke screen of a terrific soundtrack seemingly attempting to distract from an otherwise empty movie. The Bikeriders is a lot of smoking, drinking, fighting, and toxic masculinity with little substance. Sometimes men really do suck.

Grade: C