Time is at the centre of most sad films. The loss of it. The want of it. The lack of it. The slippery elusiveness of it. Time, and the difficulty of showing how it passes, is also what complicates many sad films. A tragedy over a few months is one thing, but what about a slow build-up over years? How do you present the march of it within two hours while giving the audience enough to feel the weight of it? And how do you present that march of time when your film is also steeped in a distant past?
There is a requiem for the past bleeding into almost every frame of Jeff Nichols’ “The Bikeriders”. It is looking back, sometimes wistful or sometimes ambivalent, to a very specific time in the sixties tracing the rise of a Chicago outlaw motorcycle club, The Vandals. That’s where the sharpest arc of the story is, following the collection of men clinging to something to belong to amidst their uncertainty of the world about them. Many of their emotions are familiar today, even if the specific dynamics of the motorcycle culture might not seem that way immediately.
Films opt for myriad ways to drop us into the past, and Nichols (director and writer) chooses a familiar one. Rather than leaving us to fend for ourselves in this world, he offers us an avatar in the form of Kathy (Jodie Comer) – a woman who gets swept up by the club when she falls in love with one of its members (Austin Butler as Benny). Years after the die has been cast for the complicated rise and changes of The Vandals, a photographer and interviewer (Mike Faist as Danny Lyon) sits with Kathy to interview her about what became of the club. Her interview will become the shape of the film and our entry point to this world. It threads the movement of time.
The story of The Vandals, as told by Kathy, becomes discursive as her relationship with the sombre Benny parallels the actual dynamics of the club and its founder, Johnny (Tom Hardy). Through her we hear facts, or at least assumptions, of its history. She muses that Johnny got the idea while watching TV, and we cut to a flashback of Hardy’s Benny watching a charismatic Marlon Brando onscreen in “The Wild One”. We hear about her first time seeing Benny, and we cut to Austin Butler at a pool table, penetrating gaze and pent-up energy. This becomes the rhythm of “The Bikeriders”, and it’s not long before the rhythm begins to strain.
We spend a lot of time with Kathy. Not just in her interviews, but in the reported history where she plays a part. Her very specific kind of Chicagoan accent runs through the narrative, sweeping through years in minutes and through blistering trauma in seconds. Hopping from scene to scene, the story often feels more non-linear than it is as it seeks Kathy out. The camera seeks out her face in shots of the riders, often in either befuddlement or consternation. Kathy is our audience surrogate. She is the familiar person from whom we can learn of this world. She is, importantly, the only woman with more than a handful of speaking lines although the film never does enough with this to offer anything thoughtful on gender dynamics in this world. There are, also, only two moments where anything Kathy is working towards in “The Bikeriders” feels as compelling as the psychology of this band of sometimes sad, sometimes aimless, often desperate men clinging to each other for the hope of some togetherness. (One is a face-off with Johnny about ownership of Benny, the other is a breakdown to Benny after the threat of sexual violence by a club member.)
The narrative compulsion for Kathy’s inclusion is clear, even when the emotional resonant is not. She gives shape to the narrative based on how Nichols has chosen to adapt this story. Her interviews are the frame for the way the film is told and she also qualifies our responses to things. Time is at the centre of “The Bikeriders” because it is a tragic film. The characters are victims to its toll. The weight of it ages them and changes them. But it’s a toll that is early on rendered elusive for audiences when the framing device of Kathy’s interruptive interviews begin to compromise our ability to feel the weight of it.
Moments of fraught emotion are interrupted by her dictating what we see happening on screen. Many motions of deep emotional release, legible through performance, are then rendered as appendage when her narration bleeds in to overemphasise a thing for an audience. In scene after scene, we see an action play out, only for Kathy’s voice to intrude explaining to us the context of what we see. It is as if Nichols will not trust us to invest in the tragedy, or will not trust the actors to convey the weight of their lot in life. And, so, at every turn when “The Bikeriders” begins to settle into the elegiac nature of the sad and cruel lives of these people and the world they inhabit, we draw back to return to our interview. It’s a consistent quality that shackles “The Bikeriders” and creates an imbalance that often feels like the film avoiding the tough and complicated emotions that might serve its moody aesthetic better.
You feel it in the way the film looks, too. Adam Stone’s cinematography gets much more mileage from the expansion of roads and rooms the riders and their spouses spill into. He gets less out of the glaring lights in the present where Kathy is interviewed. Kathy’s interviews do much for the structure of “The Bikeriders”, but the aesthetic and formal strengths of the film are less adept at explicating her value. Moreover, the true thematic resonance that can be extracted here is never convincingly bound to the love story of Benny and Kathy. Moments in the film hint at a complicated kind of triangle between Kathy, Benny and Johnny. Hardy is doing the most with this, resisting a more overt dual desire for either Kathy, or Benny, and instead grounding his Johnny in a world-weariness that pours out on to the screen. Few lines in the film feel as profound and heavy as the weight of the word he repeats multiple times, “Nothing.” It’s a weariness I wish the film considered more in showing what time can do to a man, and those around him.
Somewhere in the middle of the film, its best scene emerges with a minor character at the centre. A gang of riders hang out in a field with their spouses and friends. They gather around in a circle swapping tales. Michael Shannon’s Zipco (a strange member of the club: a restless, aching, bomb of a man) has the floor and recounts a tale. It starts off with a tone of ironic humour even as the emotional place shifts as he tells the story of trying to sign up for the army to go to Vietnam. His psych course was his downfall. Shannon plays the moment perfectly. He builds up as if to tell a joke but the aching resentment seeps through as he recites the words of the doctor, “You are an undesirable!”
The moment emerges like a kind of key to understanding the emotion of The Vandals and “The Bikeriders”. But, I’m not sure if the movie itself understands that. There’s an aching story about masculinity and lack of community and the desperate way that men who feel unwanted will hold on to any rope, even if it leaves their hands bleeding. Yet, despite its title, so much of this is rendered as peripheral in “The Bikeriders”. It traps us in an ambivalent romance with a woman that it does not offer much in the way of definition beyond her storyteller role.
At the interview after the screening I attended, Jodie Comer mentioned that a lot of her dialogue was taken from interviews in the book the film is based on. It clarified a lot of what felt lacking in her Kathy. Real life language, or even nonfiction mixes of communication styles, don’t work the same for the dramaturgical heft of fictional dialogue. And written is not the same as spoken word in a film. A film character’s words must carry the weight of layers and layers of subtext beneath the surface. Nichols understands this in some conversations in the past, most of them around Hardy. They are, however, too few. Instead, Comer’s Kathy weaves in chattering away. She is saying a lot but she’s not communicating the weight of what this story needs.
Toward the end of it, the bond between two of the men in the club begins to break and one says to the other, “Is that who we are? Is that what this club is?” The moment cannot have the profundity it can when the passage of time that’s transpired has been interrupted so much. “The Bikeriders” never allows us to sit with the silence, or the weight, or the mutable power of time. Airless words interrupt to convey to us what we should be feeling, but I wish the film trusted itself to move beyond its framing device to really lure us into the way that time upends our lives. “The Bikeriders” ought to be a tragedy, but when it wraps up at the end it’s difficult to care too much about what time has wrought.
The Bikeriders is playing in cinemas
