The Bikeriders (June 17)

The Bikeriders served mostly as a conduit for Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy to practice some wild accents for your enjoyment. I saw this movie a week and a half ago now as one of the Sight Unseen movies at AMC and found it charming, immersive, and complex, a period piece that tells the story of an organization with an idealistic, slightly hapless leader who finds himself out of his depth to contain its most radical elements and vulgar impulses toward violence and excess, one that glamorizes the good old days of biker gangs when the way you resolved fights was by asking your opponent “knives or fists?” So, in short, it’s a sideways look at how the Republican party became what it is?

By contrast, one of the Friends who came was completely bored by the whole thing. “Yeah, I get that it’s a surrogate father thing and that Austin Butler only shows emotion once he figures out he wasn’t there for him when he most needed someone, but…” and I suppose that’s always the risk of a movie “based on a true story,” that ultimately you might find yourself writing a movie that hasn’t much of a plot so much as a drumbeat of “this is a thing that happened.” Character sketches don’t make a movie, but honestly how much more plot is there to Rebel Without a Cause than Bikeriders? And I supposed the answer to that question will give you a sense of whether or not you’d like this movie, because Tom Hardy is playing a small town bike head trucker dad doing an a James Dean impression the whole time.

There are a lot of unintentional similarities to a weird movie starring Andrea Riceborough called Please Baby Please which I wrote about at the beginning of last year while reveling in the weirdness of her incredible path to an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Karl Glusman actually plays an almost identical character sans his gay–well, no maybe he is actually the exact same character. But instead of satirizing the Jets and the Sharks, in this movie, he’s romanticizing the screwball days of antecedents to the Hell’s Angels. In terms of gendered storytelling, there’s a lot of gaybaiting between Hardy and Butler, especially during the picnic sequence when Johnny (Hardy) first proposes to Benny (Butler) that he should take over the family business: those moments when they are so close they look like they’re about to kiss from one camera angle before the camera shifts position and gives the two more space between them from a different vantage point.

The rape threat plot point in the second act is possibly the most egregious and uncreative moment in the entire movie, but it initiates one of the most tense and wonderful exchanges in the movie, when Johnny and Benny seem to be teaming up to (spoiler) take care of the “Roach” problem by killing him before he can retire from the gang, but instead maim him as a cover. “Is this what we are now,” Benny asks Johnny, aggrieved and disgusted by the insufficient and sideways means by which Johnny has devised to help a good and loyal member of the club. “Did we take care of Roach like you took care of Kathy?” he asks, underlining just how much the gang has spiraled out of Johnny’s control and Johnny seems hyper-aware of his constitutional inability to do better.