A movie really in line with my tastes 🙂
Not because of the bikes and the cool dudes. It has them, in spades xD, but what makes this screenplay very specific to my liking is the curiosity it shows about human differences, not generalizing, and how it takes the proper time for cinematic character-study’s due diligence.
That makes it a tricky film to recommend. If you expect it to be a crime drama with a postmodern sheen from the leather jackets, like ‘Goodfellas in choppers’, it’s not it. Also, if you expect the motorized theme to serve as an engine for a fast-paced film, nope, not that either.
However, the drama here is very strong and tastefully tapped into it. And the pacing is simultaneously ideal for what the screenplay set out to study as it is creative with its sudden time shifts (which are also important for our own relationship with the myths here deconstructed).
Look, I don’t care a bit for the cult of loud engines as proof of man’s exceptionalism. But, the power of cinema is capturing these raspy-sounding motors in motion, with confident-looking actors in them, and then using such framing to explore why were these men in need of external engines to pump their internal ones.
The Bikeriders has really good cinematography, costuming and art direction, that give the film the aesthetic it needs (and we were expecting from), but with a twist. Being interested in exploring the rise and fall of mythmaking, it’s important that these images exude an aura of gods down on earth playing in the mud. And then time shift to everyday normal life.
Add to that the jukebox soundtrack almost always playing (with the exception of those time shifts), and there is here a very intentional stylization on the surface of life-myth as a sum of greatest hits of epicness, chill and escapism. However, if you listen closely to the lyrics of some carefully chosen and positioned songs, you will notice a cry for help.
And that’s The Bikeriders in a nutshell: a cinematically textured object that is very interested in using its images to peer into its subjects’ souls. It works because the filmmakers are never judgmental about the biker expression and the biker lifestyle (the movie was inspired by a documentarian’s photo-book), and from that vital base they create frames from which to sequentially peel off the layers of externalization to reach motivation.
What individual and societal events (or non-events) happened in the lives of these ordinary men to motive them to self-identify with these extraordinary myths of masculinity? The movie even has the nuance of analysing different generations of externalizations and motivations.
Cut to Jodie Comer, playing the wife of one of these bikers describing some equally-carefully chosen events, and the study of the masculine myth this movie is attempting to do gains an extra non-generalized layer. She is fantastic in the role. Finally understood the hype surrounding her as an actress.
Tom Hardy is the best I’ve seen him in 10 years.
And Austin Butler… I mean… What the actual fuck… Him being aware of all this makes it even more uau.
Opinion Seed 