‘The Bikeriders’ Review: On the Road to Nowhere, Beautifully

“The Bikeriders,” a romanticized ballad of tribal love, outlaw cool and the illusion of freedom, gets your motor runnin’ early. A drama flecked with absurdity and violence, it narrates the rise and inevitable dissolution of a Midwestern motorcycle club across the 1960s into the early ’70s, from the ebbing of the greaser era and past the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Not much happens, but the people are beautiful and so too are their bikes, rumbling beasts that tribe members ride and ride on that familiar closed loop known as Nowheresville, U.S.A.

The first essential thing to know about “The Bikeriders” is that the writer-director Jeff Nichols has, improbably, based the movie on a totemic photography book of the same title by the great American photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon. The second thing is that the movie stars Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy, a troika of charisma bombs who just have to show up for me to do the same. Nicely supported by a sprawling cast of other good lookers and hard workers, these three are among the draws in a movie that understands the seductions of beauty, the sensuous lines of a human body, the curves of a chassis.

The story, such as it is, traces the evolution of a fictional Chicago-area motorcycle club, the Vandals, from its racer origins. Scrambling the chronology, Nichols opens the story midway in 1965 with one member, Benny (Butler), being harassed at a bar by two strangers who want him to remove his “colors,” his ragged denim vest adorned with the club’s name. (Why? Why not?) Soon, punches are being thrown, and one stranger is swinging a shovel at the back of Benny’s head. Nichols freezes on Benny’s face with the shovel framed behind him like a cockeyed metal halo, a wryly funny image that captures a moment in time, much as Lyon did in his photos, and heralds the violence — its threats and giddy thrills — of the bikers’ lives.

For a few years in the early and mid-1960s when Lyon was in his 20s, he rode with a real Chicago club, the Outlaws, one of the oldest such groups in the country, charting his adventure in photographs and audio recordings. In 1968, the year before Dennis Hopper’s biker film “Easy Rider” opened, Lyon published “The Bikeriders,” a collection of black-and-white photos with accompanying interviews. One of his interviewees was the real Benny’s wife, Kathy Bauer, a philosopher of male behavior whom Nichols has made the narrator and is played by Comer with rough charm and a chewy, g-dropping accent. (You can compare her pitch-perfect interpretation of Bauer’s voice on Lyon’s website bleakbeauty.com.)

Using the book as his lodestar, Nichols borrows from Lyon by turns directly, elliptically and sometimes clumsily, while making some instructive omissions: Some of the bikers wear Iron Cross patches, but if there’s a Nazi swastika or Confederate flag here, emblems flaunted by some white bikers including Danny’s old Outlaw pals, I missed it. Nichols’s most cumbersome move is to have turned Lyon into a supporting character, a bland, earnest smiler (Mike Faist), who basically holds a mic while Kathy chronicles her biker life and times. More subtle and intriguing are Nichols’s efforts to capture the power of Lyon’s photos which — with their dynamic mixture of pictorial beauty and thematic grit, hyper-masculinity and homosocial intimacy — tell a specific 20th-century American story of being and belonging.

To that end, Nichols at times re-creates the original photographs, say, with a shot of Benny riding alone across a bridge while looking backward, an image that condenses the paradoxes of his life. Like the other club members, Benny tends to rack up miles without going anywhere very far, a provincialism that is one of the most American things about them. In another scene, Kathy recounts the first time she saw Benny, head bowed, leaning on a barroom pool table with his bared, muscly arms. Nichols catches this moment memorably, as does Comer, whose face opens in wonder as the camera pushes in toward Benny and he raises his head.