‘The Bikeriders’ Review: Austin Butler and Tom Hardy Are Cool Personified in the ‘Godfather’ of Biker Movies
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic Don’t let the word “bike” fool you. In Jeff Nichols’ “The Bikeriders,” the wheels in question are choppers — good, all-American motorcycles, built from the ground up by tough guys in leather jackets — and the “club” they’re a part of is really more of a gang.
Nichols hails from the Heartland (from Little Rock, Arkansas, to be precise) and has a better handle on the life and attitudes one finds in so-called “flyover country” than nearly all the directors working at his level.
You’ve probably seen a few of his films, most of which take place down dirt roads in rural areas. Movies like “Shotgun Stories,” “Loving” and “Mud.” With “The Bikeriders,” Nichols brings us into the big city — or the outskirts, at least — and then zeroes in on a social microcosm all of us recognize, but few have actually penetrated: a Chicago-area motorcycle club who call themselves the Vandals.
The Vandals don’t really exist, but both the group and a number of its members — guys like Johnny (Tom Hardy), Benny (Austin Butler), Cal (Boyd Holbrook), Zipco (Michael Shannon) and Cockroach (Emory Cohen), who eats bugs — were directly inspired by Danny Lyon’s 1968 photo collection, “The Bikeriders,” a thin book of fewer than 100 pages whose iconic black-and-white images serve as the raw material for Nichols’ full-color imagination.
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