When Sean Monahan birthed the term “vibe shift” to complement his withering observations of the transition from millennial norm-core style (a phrase he, along with his trend forecasting company K-Hole, also invented) to “indie sleaze,” he was participating in a tradition that stretched back eons, even if it was done so in a way that rang fresh to the ears of those writing at a New York Magazine vertical. Like people, cultures, be they sub-, mono- or counter-, are not immune to the passage of time. They can grow and expand, acting as transformative influences on the world, eventually seeming to be as if they were always there, at least once enough folks who could remember the Good Old Days, the Dark Ages, or whatever have died out.
But plenty of cultures have gone through a metastatic vibe shift, in which their cultural fruits withered on the vine and, in some cases, became poisonous to those who ventured a bite. Among the many reasons why the ‘60s remain such an artistic and aesthetic era is because of how many of its era-identifiable cultures went through a tumultuous change thanks to the chaos of that era. Kennedy Democrats wind up voting for Nixon — twice. Once benign-yet-odd-seeming hippies fall under suspicion in their towns and cities out of fear that they’ll go on acid-fueled killing sprees at the behest of a cult leader. Peaceful protestors, righteously angry about Vietnam, started mailing bombs and robbing banks. These are over-simplifications of vastly more complex evolutions than I have space to delineate here, but the point stands. The Overton window shifted quickly in response to traumas large and small, everything changed, and we’re all still grappling with the consequences.
Jeff Nichols’ poetic and deeply felt new film The Bikeriders documents the transformation of one of these subcultures – the motorcycle club – into something that would be unrecognizable and unpalatable to its original members. When Johnny (Tom Hardy) founded a Chicago motorcycle club, the Vandals MC, in ’65, he did so for two reasons. First, he wanted to broaden his horizons beyond family life (though he loves his wife and daughters) and his job as a long-haul trucker. The second was because he saw just how cool Marlon Brando looked in The Wild One when he saw him tough-talking in leather when it showed as the Saturday night movie on a local TV station. It could have been anything – perhaps in another world, he could have joined Bill Russell and gotten obsessed with model trains – but it was bikes. It started as simple racing on dirt paths, but as the gang grew and grew, it became something closer to a fraternity in every sense of the word.
Their members were oddballs and outcasts, such as a mechanical genius with few people skills (Boyd Holbrook), a nutty Hungarian (Michael Shannon), or a wannabe cop who had a habit of eating cockroaches to freak out the folks around him (Emory Cohen). That’s what drew in Kathy (Jodie Comer, doing a hilariously on-point accent that recalls Linda Manz in Malick’s Days of Heaven), or at least one of these weirdos, a hot-as-hell rolling-stone-no-moss type named Benny (Austin Butler) who won her heart through sheer goofy persistence after a meet-cute at the club’s hideaway. She falls in love with him on the back of his bike, watching as the other members of the gang speed to them over a bridge in the middle of the night — the roar of the engines, the soft halogen of their lights, the wind rolling through her hair – and who wouldn’t, honestly?
Nichols sets this scene to the Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets,” a bit of humble forecasting rendered gorgeously in the moment. After all, such is the nature of the splatter-platter narrative: It’s a memorial to lost loves, though, in that recounting, it’s the girl who makes her man give up the things that drew her to him in the first place instead of a massive crash in a drag race. And The Bikeriders gives us plenty of that: Benny gets beat up for wearing his colors, members die in horrific ways on the roadways, and it all starts to take a bitter toll on Johnny. He wants Benny to be his man, but Kathy’s married him, and besides, Benny doesn’t want any of their responsibilities in the first place. He wants to be the dude outracing the cops in the cornfields, devil-may-care making bail after running red lights and crashing cruisers ‘til his gas tank’s empty. So, the membership expands.
Their first hint at what’s to come is at one of their massive reunions when a drifter with rotting teeth (Norman Reedus) shows up from California. He’s there to beat the shit out of one of the guys but winds up deciding to stay with them (and doesn’t lay a finger on his victim). He fits into the group nice enough, but the threat still stands. Other cities want to start their own Vandals chapter, with little oversight from the stretched-too-thin Johnny. A whole group of Vietnam vets have come back and don’t fit in – they need the product they got hooked on in the service, as well as some of that brotherhood they might have found overseas, and join up. Then there are the “troubled teens,” like The Kid (Toby Wallace), who left violent homes and petty crime when they saw how tough these leather-wearing motherfuckers looked rolling through the Chicago streets, only to be disappointed when they find out they’re just weird, ambition-less nerds at heart, satisfied with getting drunk at barbecues and riding around at night instead of doing what the Angels do. As the body count rises, the transformation begins.
Documenting this all the way is Danny Lyon (Mike Faist), a young photographer and interviewer who’s looking to tell their tale in a book and who winds up becoming a pseudo-member before he leaves for New York and new professional opportunities. When he comes back in ’73, everything has changed – lots of the old gang are dead, and most of the others have scattered even if the club’s still standing – but Kathy’s still willing to talk to him, and most of the film unfolds in flashback, with occasional jumps to have Lyon interject with a question or thought. This is where I say that this was Based On A True Story, with the 1968 book published by the real-life Lyon – an accomplished photographer and filmmaker – serving as the source material for this lightly fictionalized adaptation. The timeframe of Lyon’s involvement with the gang is shifted a bit – he was with them for four years, getting out before the ‘70s dawned – and there are other alterations, but there’s a true fidelity in the way that Nichols captures the tone and tenor of his work. Kathy’s narration preserves the voices of those he interviewed, and the production design – the costuming, the bikes, the landscapes – is brilliantly realized.
One talent Nichols has that makes him genuinely perfect for features like this is his ability to find actors with perfectly contemporary faces for the parts they’re given. Think Adam Driver in Midnight Special or Shannon in Take Shelter: These guys look like they’ve always been their characters, and this skill is amplified here. It’s hard to believe he’s never done a proper period piece, as Nichols’ movies feel of a different time and place than many of his contemporaries. Perhaps it’s just those Midwest vibes, as, after all, one of the points of this is that the Outlaws stayed unmolested by the changing times until they did because they were far away from the coasts.
What’s frustrating about The Bikeriders is something that Nichols doesn’t have any control over and isn’t often something worth writing about – it’s how its audience will react to how this story unfolds. The film’s first half is gorgeous, full of vibrancy, humor, and that fabulist, poetically-exaggerated Scorsese energy. But what separates this from, say, Goodfellas or Boogie Nights or any other epic about a “family” engaged in morally compromised actions is that Nichols is endeared by his characters but isn’t in love with them. Sure, he loves their aesthetic and the purity of their initial ethos, but there’s a reason Kathy’s narrating here aside from Comer’s accent work. She’s got enough distance to see how badly things are going and enough perspective by the end of the film to properly diagnose what’s going on as she tries to pry her husband away from the swiftly changing gang. They’re all a bunch of beautiful losers, and the film is an achingly gorgeous tribute to them and their moment in time, but it has passed and is gone forever. In short, it is a bummer, and gorgeously so, but one that may be properly alienating to the crowd.
Nichols wisely hammers how much these characters have lost because of this vibe shift, with the high watermark of this subculture hitting a few years before Hunter Thompson found his own in Vegas. Henry Hill got his just desserts but eeks out a comfortable existence after betraying his idols, and Dirk Diggler may not be a star anymore but he’s still got All The Friends He Made Along The Way, but these guys are either dead, servants to a new gang leader, or wishing they were on the road again from easy chairs, mourning the newfound solitude of real adult isolation. Their hearts really were left out on the streets, but if you look closely at one of Lyon’s photos, you might still be able to find their scorched tire marks on the American cultural road.