The Bikeriders: Movie Review

Cast: Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Mike Faist

Director: Jeff Nichols

More a vibe and a mood than an actual movie, Take Shelter director Jeff Nichols' The Bikeriders is an at times snoozefest.

Set against a framing device of Jodie Comer's Kathy being interviewed by an arts student (Challengers' star Faist), Nichols spins a 1960s-set tale of Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals, and their enigmatic leader Johnny (Hardy, in broody and brutal form) and newcomer Benny (Butler in a clearl homage to James Dean.)

Simply ambling through the times, The Bikeriders charts a ramshackle descent into storytelling, with little to no depth outside brief moments within their world. 

It feels pulled from stereotype rather than anything more, despite starting promisingly with an intent to showcase its dramatic edges. Instead those edges are smoothed out and dropped in favour of a hangout movie that threatens to boil over in parts, but never actually does.

There's an irony that Johnny's desire to start a club comes from seeing a moment with Marlon Brando's The Wild One line, because Butler seems to want to channel that aesthetic and nothing more throughout the film, a frustratingly disappointing character that seems ripped from tropes rather than dramatic edges.

It may be an ode to bike riding in general, but in truth, The Bikeriders seems forever to be lost on its journey to find some kind of identity for itself. It's a double irony too that the film is framed around a photographer searching for clues about what it takes to be part of a club - too much of the movie is spent searching for its own form - and when it does finally come in a series of crackling moments toward the end, the Goodfellas-esque denouement feels emotionally void.

It's unfair to mention The Bikeriders and not to laud its cast. 

Hardy is excellent as the clearly internalising Johnny, who spends the entire film brooding ready to blow and whose quiet squeaky mid-Western drawl belies a menace that's forever oozing out of him.

But if Hardy is excellent, Comer is more than his equal (and in parts, excels further).

Her Kathy, while denied the emotional depth and centre that would have anchored this film more into the dramatic realms it aspires to, brings the light, the heart and the sparkle the movie needed.

Ultimately though, The Bikeriders spends too much of its time spinning its wheels.