Friday, June 28, 2024

The Bikeriders (dir. Jeff Nichols, 2023)

Jeff Nichols’ film The Bikeriders exists in a realm beyond sexuality, and that’s one reason why it’s able to comment intelligently on masculinity and male sexuality in particular. The movie is narrated by Jodie Comer’s character Kathy, who marries Austin Butler’s alluring bikerider named Benny just five weeks after she meets him. But the heart of the story, which spans from 1965 to 1973, is really a love triangle in which Kathy is competing for Benny’s affections with Johnny (Tom Hardy), the shifty leader of a Chicago motorcycle gang called the Vandals. All three actors seem quite aware of the deeper implications of these complicated relationships, and the screenplay is tailored for the audience to grasp what’s going on clearly as well. In one confrontational scene, Kathy tells Johnny point-blank of his man-crush on Benny, “You can’t have him,” and then later in the film when Benny disappears for over a year on the road, she says to Johnny outright, “Looks like neither of us got him.”

Despite Kathy’s narration of the movie, the focus throughout remains fixed on the men, whom she mentions upon first meeting the Vandals at a bar are all just walking around “half-naked,” showing off their muscles and torsos. Like studded leather jackets, chains, and motorcycle gear, Kathy and the other women in the film are a type of accessory for the bikers, whose entire reason for forming the biker club is their interest in each other. The guys hang out together, drinking, brawling and stirring up trouble, and they remain in close physical proximity to each other the whole time. They want certain kinds of freedom and seek to live outside the zones of propriety that the culture has constructed around them, including pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality, even if the era in which the film is set limits the extent to which that can be openly acknowledged. When Kathy tells Johnny that she’s Benny’s wife, not him, Johnny exclaims, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” while knowing full well exactly what Kathy means.

Austin Butler, who deserved the Oscar for Best Actor for his recent portrayal of Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, endows Benny with a lanky, semi-tortured sensuality that’s also in total control of its own sense of self-awareness. He’s like a bundled-up hybrid of the Dillon brothers back in their ’80s movies heyday. After Benny nearly gets his foot chopped off in an altercation with two men from a rival biker gang, he’s lying in bed recovering from the injury when Johnny stops by to see him and says that Benny’s all propped up like the queen. “Who you callin’ a queen?” replies Benny, a little more than fairly knowingly. Jodie Comer’s performance as Kathy is also knowing and precise in a way that’s hard for an actress to telepathically convey to viewers because her character has to keep Benny’s attention while understanding that doing so too much could also cause her to lose him forever to Johnny and the gang.

Johnny is both Benny’s protector and enabler. A kind of daddy figure, Johnny wants to keep Benny by his side, but he also wants Benny to maintain a badboy image, get himself in trouble, and earn his stripes as a member of the motorcycle club. Of course, it’s ultimately a poisonous relationship, even though Johnny is the only person whom Benny sheds any tears for when Johnny’s shot and killed later in the film; we’re told by Kathy that Benny hadn’t even cried when his own actual father died. To refer to the motorcycle club as a brotherhood or fraternity is accurate, yet the men also seem to serve as more than that for one another. The risks they take for each other are similar to the sacrifices men make in wartime scenarios. We also learn that some of the bikers had been turned away from military service because they were simply too rowdy and not fit for it. Their shared identities as outlaws and outsiders only further bond them together as a group of social misfits.

The most intimate scene in the movie happens during a biker rally by the campfire late at night, when Johnny pulls Benny aside to inform Benny of his plan to pass along his leadership of the gang to Benny. The way that Tom Hardy plays the scene physically, moving in close enough to kiss Austin Butler on more than one occasion, makes it obvious that there was always something more to why Johnny always wanted Benny around. Johnny also shows almost no interest whatsoever in his wife or his two daughters. In the few scenes in which they appear, it’s as if they’re just a distraction to him, or like they’re not even there at all. His marriage and fatherhood are merely social expectations that he’s fulfilling because he’s supposed to, and he’s also living in a period of history in which being gay or bisexual instead wouldn’t even have been an option for him. And so he became the founder of the motorcycle club to create his own kind of homosocial space for men to join up and for him to lord over. Benny finally escapes Johnny’s power over him when Benny re-appears at the very end of The Bikeriders as its closing image, appearing content in his marriage to Kathy and in his job as a car mechanic, yet he’s still feeling lured back to the open road by the sound of roaring motorcycles passing by in the distance, clearly a metaphor for other kinds of potential masculine temptations.

The Bikeriders is based on Danny Lyon’s 1967 photography book of the same title, in which Lyon supplemented his images of the bikers with text inspired by his extensive interviews with the bikers and their wives and girlfriends, conducted while riding along with them all over the country for several years. The photographs remain striking and indelible, with dashes of (anti-)fashion sensibilities that have influenced everything from George Michael’s infamous biker look for his “Faith” music video to wider swaths of gay male leather and BDSM subcultures. I browsed through a portfolio of the photos and found one picture of two bikers nicknamed Corky and Funny Sonny (both of whom are characters in the film) in an intense and dedicated liplock with each other. It’s a serious kiss in the spirit of the open road, surprisingly, and not being played for a joke. Jeff Nichols’ film regards male sexuality with the same sort of seriousness, in a manner that’s also appropriate for the decades in which the movie takes place.

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