Jeff Nichols he is someone who, even when it comes to talking about apocalypses on earth or paranoia, always chooses an intimate and “composed” tone, who never backs down from the conclusions he sets but who is not interested in appearing aggressive or uncomfortable.
In fact, it’s strange to read his name as the screenwriter and director of a story about bikers that is supposedly made up of robberies, reprisals and fistfights, but it seems that Jeff Nichols had been chasing the idea of making a film about bikers for several years and that the photo-reportage by Danny Lyon who also gives the film its title arrived subsequently scripts that he was preparing.
The Bikeriders in fact it is the investigation published in 1967 by Lyon on the famous group of the “Outlaws” (one of the great “M”s of the biker world), of which he followed as an “internal” journey and rites of passage and which in addition to immortalizing them in splendid photographs during their gatherings and collected testimonies and stories.
The director, however, is keen to include all these testimonies in an explicitly fictional story and in fact the Outlaws here become the “Vandals” and Tom Hardy its dreamy and tough leader Johnny embodies it magnificently, a man aware of the imminent end of his dream and who sees in the young maverick Benny (the always magnificent Austin Butlernow well underway) the only hope of carrying forward his legacy of “purity” and freedom.
Too bad that Benny finds himself halfway between the inviolable rules of the club and his love for the determined Kathy (Jodie Comer). And that his self-destructive and free spirit does not fit well in a situation like this, leading to a series of inevitable choices and turns that will inevitably affect the very life of the club.
Telling us all this is an anonymous journalist (of whom Jeff Nichols himself seems to be totally disinterested in the development or characterization) who reconstructs everyone’s destinies through the interview with Kathy.
Firm in all his stylistic principles, Jeff Nichols also places his The Bikeriders in a calm area of “greys”absolutely careful not to mythologize – but not to despise – the actions and principles of his characters.
Aware of all the main models to which the contemporary spectator’s imagination can refer, the film seems to choose to deliberately place itself in a “safety zone”, where the epic Oedipal-Shakespearean tragedy of Sons of Anarchy and the utopian hymn of the mythological Easy Rider are cautiously distilled until they are just “humours” which, more or less explicitly (and, it must be said, used intelligently without being pedantic), they try to give character to a story that unfortunately seems to be missing when the credits roll clearly explicit lack of desire to dare a little more character.
In this simple structure, however, the entire architrave of The Bikeriders project emerges and makes it its own the magnificent interpretation of the triptych of protagonistswhich absolutely with equal merit offers sensational, heartfelt and never over the top performances, with crazy voice work which makes the film absolutely worth enjoying in the original language.
Also because, when the three of them are not on stage, there is a host of superlative actors acting as “character actors” (Norman Reedus, Emory Cohen And Michael Shannon above all), who magnificently embody the humanity of their characters.
Roles that become even more important since it is precisely in these subplots and fragments that the inspiration from “reportage” becomes explicit and Jeff Nichols chooses to stop, not tell anything and limit himself to describing these “snapshots” leaving The Bikeriders to show his heart managing to give the best of himself, where the splendid photography of Adam Stone and the director’s suffused – but interested – gaze pauses to observe all these small “marking” and intimate moments like the emotion in the eyes of a man who watches Marlon Brando fascinated on TV. The Savage (which among other things would seem true for the true leader of the original Outlaws) or of bloody and sudden fights that promptly end shortly after in front of a fire, with rivers of beer talking about motors and travel.
It is precisely thanks to these frequent moments that it literally feels like “flipping through” The Bikeriders, almost as if it were the reportage from which it takes inspiration. All with its own pace and offering everything the viewer wants from a similar product, but with its own times and references that are proudly “out of time”, so much so that you leave the room almost dazed (and sorry) to find ourselves in 2024.
And similar sensations, right now, are no small thing.
Below you will find the Italian trailer of The Bikeriders, in our cinemas from June 19th:
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