Jeff Nichols (2023)
Jeff Nichols wrote and directed five features between 2007 and 2016; the last two – Midnight Special and Loving – premiered only three months apart. I’ve missed seeing new work from him since and was looking forward to The Bikeriders at the London Film Festival, where the film received its European premiere. Sad to say, it’s a mystifying disappointment.
The source material is a 1968 book of the same name by the American photographer Danny Lyon. For several years in the mid-1960s, Lyon followed a motorcycle gang, the Chicago Outlaws, around the Midwest; his book comprises his interviews with gang members, as well as photographs of them. Nichols’s fictional screenplay is also structured around interviews conducted by Danny Lyon (Mike Faist), chiefly with a young woman called Kathy (Jodie Comer), who meets and falls in love with Benny (Austin Butler). A biker in a gang called the Vandals, Benny is considered heir apparent to their leadership – certainly by the Vandals’ current top man, veteran Johnny (Tom Hardy).
Jeff Nichols’s treatment of the material is fatally indecisive. The Bikeriders is neither pseudo-documentary nor fully-fledged drama but drifts on in limbo between the two. The Shangri-Las are well represented on the soundtrack (though not by ‘Leader of the Pack’) but the people on screen are, as you’d expect, predominantly male. It’s therefore an interesting idea to make a female character the film’s central consciousness but this amounts to little more than a narrative device. Lyon the interviewer doesn’t really probe what drew Kathy to the bikers’ world or how she felt being part of it; the interviews with her are just a framework in which to place incidents from the lives and interactions of the principals. The juxtaposition of these with what Kathy says to Lyon (and to camera) is at times so lame it verges on the disorienting. Kathy recalls the time when Benny sustained serious foot injuries. Cut to him in a hospital bed, tearfully pleading with her, ‘Don’t let them amputate my foot – if they amputate my foot I can’t ride a bike any more’. Cut back to Kathy being interviewed; ‘You see,’ she tells Lyon, as if about to reveal something unexpected, ‘that’s what scared Benny: if they amputated his foot, he wouldn’t be able to ride his bike’.
The interviews with Kathy continue beyond the timeframe of Danny Lyon’s original fieldwork and book: Lyon goes to see her again in 1973. After a period of separation, she and Benny are back together. He’s given up gang life and is working as a mechanic in his brother’s garage. Kathy claims to be happy with that yet her tone and the shots of Benny at work combine to imply he’s less of a man now than in his leathers heyday. The moment I liked best in the film was a much briefer glimpse into Johnny’s domestic life. He calls in at home before setting out for a showdown with a new kid on the biking block (Toby Wallace). Johnny’s wife (I can’t work out from the IMDb cast list which actress this is) is listlessly watching TV. She seems vaguely annoyed but not at all surprised that her husband’s going out for the evening. She instructs him to pick up some eggs on his way home and he nods almost sheepishly. He never makes it back.
Some of the plentiful violence in The Bikeriders is almost as noisy as the motor bikes that often upstage the people riding them. Jodie Comer brings some welcome human energy and vocal colour to proceedings though she’s very obviously putting on a Midwest accent. Austin Butler evokes the film’s photographic origins in the wrong way: he suggests a fashion model, one who has studied 1960s biker iconography but lacks the dramatic oomph to translate his camera poses into character. Nichols gives Mike Faist next to nothing to do. Tom Hardy is OK though the nature of the love that Kathy says Johnny has for Benny isn’t explored.
Michael Shannon, who has a small part as an oddball biker called Zipco, has been in every one of Nichols’s movies, including a seven-minute short, Long Way Back Home (available on YouTube), the only film Nichols has released between Loving and The Bikeriders, in 2018. In that same year, according to IMDb:
‘… Jeff Nichols revealed he had been thinking about making a biker film set in the 1960s for five years, although he did not at that stage have a script, and mentioned the idea on the set of Long Way Back Home to Michael Shannon who reportedly told him “You’ve been talking about that damn idea for so long. You’re never gonna make that [film]”.’
This information is included in the ‘Trivia’ section of The Bikeriders’ entry on IMDB but I’m not sure it is trivial. Shannon’s brief appearance in this new film serves as a reminder of the superior quality of Nichols’s previous work. It’s hard not to wonder if bringing The Bikeriders to the screen became an end in itself for him – or if he’d thought about the ‘damn idea for so long’ that he accumulated too many ideas in his head about how to make it. Here’s hoping anyway that Jeff Nichols returns to more regular film-making – and to form – soon.
6 October 2023
