Director Jeff Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter) is back after an eight-year hiatus from feature films. The Bikeriders proves to be one of his best-looking films yet—but it’s not one of his best.
It’s a good movie. I enjoyed it. But it never really gets under the surface of what it’s trying to portray, that being the onset of biker-gang culture in the ’60s. He captures the look and style, but his screenplay (based on a photobook of the same name) feels a little too episodic rather than epic.
Maybe it needed to be about an hour longer. That wouldn’t have been a bad thing; being in the presence of characters like Johnny (Tom Hardy), the leader of a biker gang called the Vandals, and moody rider Benny (Austin Butler, always doing good work) screams for more depth.
In the end, the characters are just sketches. Maybe that was the intent—to provide sketch portrayals of images from an infamous photobook? I don’t know, but the whole thing left me mildly entertained, but feeling a little empty.
The film is garnering comparisons to some of Martin Scorsese’s works like Goodfellas. For me, the unfortunate Scorsese comparison is that Jodie Comer—an actress I love—adapts an accent that sounds way too much like the awful one Joe Pesci used in Casino, one of my least-favorite Scorsese films. There were times when I just couldn’t get past the grating sound of it.
Still, The Bikeriders is a decent, somewhat entertaining movie. It could’ve been great. Maybe we will get a director’s cut that fleshes things out a bit.
The Bikeriders is playing at theaters across the valley.
With so much of what’s being made for theaters (G animation at one end and horror at the other of the spectrum), I looked forward to the R-rated The Bikeriders. A thoughtful film intended for adults! And it was good, some of the scenes brilliant. Certainly worth seeing, with the sound and visuals playing well on the big screen.
Indeed, I like the cast so much (Michael Shannon, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer, Mike Faist, Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus et al.) that I repeatedly saw it (3 times over 2 weeks), hoping to understand why Jeff Nichols undersold some of his key actors by a screenplay only he wrote. In the end I found the film being good but not great a feature of its writing.
*SPOILERS*
For instance about wasted writing opportunity, with the three leads in what’s marketed as a sort of love triangle with Austin Butler in the middle, there’s not one kiss despite AB and JC quickly becoming married in the movie and TH — who mainly ignores his wife and daughters at home — nearly salivating with desire every time he’s around AB.
We see TH at home to get a sense of his domestic vacuity, but while in the midwest (most of the film) we never see AB and JC together at home except briefly for one argument. He never kisses her, and she never kisses him. (What a waste of AB’s on-screen rizz. He conveys passion or at least affection by his gaze and how he touches her in one scene after he’s injured, but what a waste of young Hollywood’s most kissable mouth.)
In a later scene where TH could have followed AB after AB turns to walk away in rebuffing an offer about the motorcycle club, TH does not come after him to say “wait, I really need ya,” and then move in for a kiss where AB could have simply said “I’m not with you,” and kept walking away. From that all the action would have proceeded more plausibly for the rest of the movie.
These small changes, or something similar would have filled in personality and interest regarding AB’s character, left too deliberately a blank if outwardly beautiful slate by Nichols’ writing. (With so bankable a young actor coming off Dune2 Feyd-Rautha success, Nichols missed box office as well as creative opportunity.)
I’m not a screenwriter, only a professionally trained mainly technical writer who off the top of my spitballing head came up with what would have developed the characters and plot in a way that didn’t leave a gaping hole and waste acting talent. Imagine if Jeff Nichols had actually had pro screenwriting input to his script! But Jeff Nichols apparently disdains the maxim of “two [sometimes more] heads are better than one,” in that he reportedly never uses a writing team or script editors. And it shows. He could have definitely used the inputs of others for writing The Bikeriders as for other of his films that didn’t do nearly the box office their casts should command.
In Nichols’ past, Mud bogged down in audience boredom with the second and third acts, yawn. With two global super stars (and the incomparable Sam Shepard), Mud as his best film at the box office should have done 5x or more its 10M budget globally. Take Shelter was good because Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain are great. Same for Loving with Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton (where there was boredom with screenplay’s mid-section that likely affected WOM for the majority not enamored of great acting regardless of plot).
Well that’s enough and I’ve gotten this off my chest. But because I love film as an art form and value the hard and dedicated work of our best actors, I wish all our innately talented auteur directors could get over themselves and consider other perhaps better grounded POVs in finalizing screenplays for the sake of both actors and audience. (Do not get me started on how I loved Poor Things yet applaud audience members walking out of the Yorgos depravity misnomer Kinds of Kindness aka Cradles of Cruelty. Definitely see The Bikeriders instead of KoK while they’re both still in theaters.)