Review: ‘The Bikeriders’ is a gorgeously steely vehicle for Austin Butler, just as much as he’s a vehicle for the film

When the world at large first caught wind of The Bikeriders in the fall of last year, the changes in the air pressure were palpable. In that moment, no longer were we sitting smack-dab in the middle of an abusive relationship between Hollywood and IPs that were far too moldable for their own good; instead, we were nuzzled tightly under the arm of a darkly whimsical, whiskey-scented, sharply stylized tour-de-force that couldn’t care less about impressing anyone but itself, and boy does it ever make itself work for it.

This is not a knock on the film culture that surrounds The Bikeriders. In fact, one might even say part of the reason it oozes so much scrumptious cinematic mojo is that it has this backdrop to stand against, much in the same way that the film itself juxtaposes freedom and control in a dance that resembles a diesel-tinted Matryoshka doll. And with Austin Butler leading the charge as Benny — the understated atomic bomb of a renegade that anchors the whole thing — the only path The Bikeriders ever could have taken was one of utter glory.

Inspired by Danny Lyon’s 1967 photo book of the same name, The Bikeriders tells the tale of Vandals MC, a motorcycle club founded by a man named Johnny (Tom Hardy), which undergoes a sinister metamorphosis as the culture surrounding the club begins to shift and its many players are faced with daunting choices. One of these players is Benny (Butler), a longtime member of Vandals and Johnny’s confidant, whose loyalty to Vandals and his own freedom begins finding itself at odds with Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer), his wife who urges him to leave the culture behind before it costs him his life.

We’ll get back to Butler in a moment because where the Oscar nominee is the heartbeat of the film, Jodie Comer’s turn as Kathy is the network of veins and arteries that directs Benny’s essence into some semblance of a man; a tenacious, engrossing, yet ultimately vulnerable man. The pronounced Midwest accent with which Comer offers her account of the Vandals’ golden years accelerates this yarn along beautifully, and the manner in which she inhabits the chaos of this culture — first as a reluctant outsider, finally as a phoenix-like empath, and always opinionated — is entirely intoxicating, and that even goes beyond the role she plays in bringing The Bikeriders‘ friction to life.

As alluded to earlier, The Bikeriders is a film about freedom, and not only what we’re willing to do to hang on to it, but also identifying what freedom means in an actionable sense; you may have the freedom to do just about anything you want, but what is it you want? The perverted beauty of merely inhabiting freedom, however, is that it implies a choice, or a number of choices, that aren’t demanding to be made. That lack of demand is a comfort not terribly dissimilar to the domesticity with which Kathy entices Benny. The difference is that one of those comforts is born of fear.

Speaking of Benny, it’s not Austin Butler who has screen presence in The Bikeriders, it’s The Bikeriders that has screen presence in Austin Butler. That’s not just an abstract testament to the actor’s performance, either; together with writer-director Jeff Nichols’ script and guidance, not a single detail involving Benny is left to chance, and every single one is embodied with a surplus of intention by the young actor. Indeed, The Bikeriders quite assertively wears its attitudes on its sleeve, and that sleeve is brought to rippling life by Butler’s bicep (both literally and figuratively).

And then there’s Tom Hardy as Johnny, a character whose presence is so absolute and so hypnotically tragic that it’s not even sincere to quantify him as human. No, Johnny is a planet full of unreasonable temperatures and drinkable water, and it appears rather tepid about the meteorite hurtling towards it.

This is to say that Johnny is the reason the world of The Bikeriders exists. As the founder of Vandals MC, the culture of the club and, by extension, American biker gangs as a whole, all lead back to Johnny. The kicker? Johnny is a married trucker with kids and got the idea for a biker gang thanks to a Marlon Brando scene he saw on television. In other words, he had very little to lose, until Vandals became everything.

“Everything,” in its earliest case, being a collective of scrappy but honest punks who needed to belong somewhere. Johnny had done the impossible; he carved out a space for those whose divine purpose is to color outside the proverbial lines. The thing is, what Johnny did there really, truly was impossible; what better way to watch man’s freedom cannibalize itself than to try and marry it with structure, slapping down layer upon layer until it comes back as a vindictive bullet, which itself mutates into vindictive freedom? This is the grief of The Bikeriders; the salvation is Benny, whose salvation is Kathy.

All in all, The Bikeriders is one of those movies that absolutely soars on the back of just being a great movie. The drama is so casually rendered that it makes the technical brilliance behind it entirely opaque, and yet the forces that make all of these characters — in their contradictions, sympathies, hostilities, and muted kineticism — collide the way they do are some of the most ferocious we may see all year. And it’s all woven quite intricately with more diverse, immediate excitements ranging from some good old-fashioned exchanges of bloody knuckles, the very intentional heartthrob factor in play, and, of course, the dazzling purrs of all those motorcycles.

The whole thing, of course, wouldn’t have been even a quarter of the film it is if the casting wasn’t up to par with Nichols’ snappy script, but Butler, Comer, and Hardy all navigated the game with sizzling rigor. It won’t be much in the way of a surprise if we see one or more of them appear on a few ballots when the time comes. Still, awards or no awards, The Bikeriders deserves to hold its leathery head high as one of the very best films of the year, right up there with Challengers and Civil War.