The year was 1968. Danny Lyon, the photojournalist had chronicled the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, of which he was a member, with images and interviews in a book The Bikeriders. Counterculture, change, and rebellion were the order of the day.
Filmmaker Jeff Nichols was so captivated by it, he spent two decades adapting it into a film. “It’s the most complex script I’ve ever written. Danny documented the subculture in its totality in his book. The full breadth and full range of it. These photographs are romantic and beautiful, but they’re not necessarily the truth,” he continues. “Then you combine them with these interviews. Those are unvarnished. They’re sometimes cruel. They’re sometimes funny. But they definitely give you the complete picture of these human beings.”
The book served as the dialogue basis for the screenplay, but it lacked any structure or plot. “It’s not attached to any specific narrative construction.”
Movies take place in moments
Nichols had his work cut out for him starting with the trajectory of a motorcycle club becoming a gang. “I knew that would happen, but movies take place in moments. Movies take place in real time, even if it takes them a course of a decade. I had to find something more tangible in the middle of the story.”
Jeff Nichols
Nichols focused on the love story between Benny (Austin Butler) and Kathy (Jodie Comer) and Benny and Johnny (Tom Hardy) to fill the second act. The challenge for the writer was re-contextualizing the interviews in those love stories.
“That’s going to be my invention. The whole thing feels like this very strange hybrid narrative documentary.” But he always wanted to capture the sense of what Danny Ryan was doing to document this subculture.
1960s Mid-West
The Bikeriders captures the uneasy spirit of a specific time and place in America.
“It all comes from Danny’s book, but it’s hard to look back at a decade that has signalled more change than the sixties.”
“And the best example is, and that’s why I look into the film with these pop culture references. The Wild One, which at the time, was a pretty daring film coming out of the 1950s studio system. It’s really a film about rape. But then you look at Easy Rider about fifteen years later, and ask what happened to the decade that connects those two films?”
“There was so much cultural change, so much social change, political change, and it felt like a very fertile place to show this shift. Danny talked about it quite well. He would say, ‘It’s a line in the film. The split between the beer drinkers and the pot smokers, the greasers versus these gutter punks. These guys are coming back from Vietnam. They look crazy, versus these other guys who put grease in their hair, and are very stout, very particular. These are guys from the fifties. These are guys from Korea.”
“They have different views on life and the world, what’s proper and what’s violent. 1965, that’s right when it starts to change.”
The Romanticized Outlaw Subculture
The motorcycle subculture thrives on the mythology of wide open spaces, freedom, and playing by their own rules outside the law. There’s a beauty and liberation in that. Jeff Nichols invites a discussion, but deliberately doesn’t draw any conclusions. The bike rider culture is presented and allowed to breathe without judgement.
“You look at a motorcycle and it’s beautiful. You want to get on it, you want to ride it, but it can also kill you. It holds that complexity and that tension. The characters in this film are like that. They recognize the attraction of this world, but they also recognize it’s dangerous. But they don’t walk away from it. In fact, they embrace it,” elaborates the filmmaker.
The filmmaker recognizes such behavior as a part of human nature. It’s part of our risk-taking behavior and desire for new and exciting adventures.
The Bikeriders explores elements of toxic masculinity to forge an identity. “We want to be unique. We don’t want to be part of the herd. If we can find an identity that’s connected to danger, we can find an identity that’s connected to something that mainstream society would not embrace. Maybe we actually have a place in this universe that is meaningful for a moment?”
Benny is ostensibly the protagonist which drives the main narrative, but Nichols considers him more of a conduit between kathy and Johnny. “He’s not the active part of it. The active parts are Kathy and Johnny. Benny is the thing that they are drawn to.”
“People can try to put things into Benny, but he’s not designed to hold them. Kathy has all this love that she wants to give him. Johnny has the love for this club he wants to give him. But they’ve both chosen the wrong vessel because he can’t hold it.”
Cracks begin to appear in Benny’s character when Kathy and Johnny ask him what he wants. He doesn’t know. “That’s where the central tragedy of the film comes from.”
Kathy (Jodie Comer) and Benny (Austin Butler) Photo courtesy of Focus Features
Nichols argues that Benny doesn’t change that much throughout the course of the film. There isn’t a grand metamorphosis or self-discovery.
As Kathy tries to convince Benny to leave the club and start a new life someplace else, she’s forced to accept his limitations. “She has more internal strength than the others put together,” mentions Nichols. “There’s no mystery that women are stronger than men, they’re more introspective and more able to express themselves and tap into their emotions.”
“A big subtext of this film, and in a lot of my films, is about the inability for men to tap into their emotions and express themselves appropriately. She’s an observer of that in this particular situation, many times over.”
“When you read these book interviews, she’s introspective, self-defeating, funny, and infuriating. She’s a full-blooded woman, she’s a real human being that has foibles, complexity, and contradictions.”
“As much as she’s trying to understand these guys, she’s also trying to understand her place in all of this at the same time. She’s trying to understand why she’s so attracted to these people, why she’s so attracted to this lifestyle. It’s like she’s working out an equation right in front of us. With no answer,” states the filmmaker.
The Nature Of Change
The Bikeriders explores the concept of change. Can one truly change themselves or another person? Can changing one’s environment change oneself? Is life pre-ordained or can we can we change our circumstance?
“I think it kind of shows up in most of my films, but it manifests itself in different ways,” says Nichols. “My first story is really about the idea that your parents are writing your script for you, intentionally or not. And you’re responsible for living that script out. The Bikeriders is different because we don’t put a lot of focus on the parents.”
“I really see it in Tom Hardy’s character. Every decision he makes, every choice that he makes, is really setting up the trajectory of his downfall. He lets the club grow. He makes the rules of fists and knives. He chooses to increase the violent nature of the club when he burns down that bar.”
Johnny (Tom Hardy) Photo by Kyle Kaplan/ Focus Features
“He makes very conscious decisions. He challenges that kid (Toby Wallace) who comes in wanting to join The Vandals. He could have extended his hand to him and send him away. But he didn’t. Every of choice he makes solidifies his tragic fate.”
Johnny’s set up as a fraud. A tough rebel with a scowl. “He used to walk around saying, ‘You can’t be half a gangster.’ And in that sense, Johnny is playing a part of a club leader. He’s very good at it for a very long time. He’s tough and scary, intimidating, and attractive. But he’s really not built for this and that’s what makes him a tragic figure. Take the colors away from him and he’s just a regular guy. He’s a truck driver with a house and a suburb and a wife and two kids.”
Setting Up The Bikeriders
The industry was coming out of the pandemic and “it was still hobbled.” Producers Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Sarah Green approached Jeff Nichols about an exciting actor named Austin Butler who was about to play Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s film. Nichols was intrigued and agreed to meet him.
Simultaneously, he had a relationship with Michael Schaefer who was the head of New Regency at the time – a company with a legacy of financing “tough to make” films like Heat, Pretty Woman, and Fight Club.
“Brian slipped him the script before we took it out to the industry at large and they quickly responded to it. The script read well. It was a bad-ass read. It was a page turner. And I think it was very easy for them to visualize it. It’s hard to make something as complicated as a screenplay feel effortless,” states Nichols.
Movie Moments
The Bikeriders offers some seminal moments both in the photographs in the book and the film. We asked Jeff if there were any special moments that made the film. “Kathy talking about this guy [Benny] sitting outside of her house all night, who just wouldn’t leave, even though her boyfriend walked outside to go to work. He stayed there until she broke down and said yes to him. This character [Benny] is really not as tough as he thinks he is, or as tough as he claims to be.”
“You’ve got another moment where Kathy’s partner walks over, you’re about to have this fight between these two clubs, and he’s trying to talk them down. It’s not going to be a big deal. This guy flies in and punches somebody in the face and all of a sudden it erupts into a fist fight and a proper brawl. Ten minutes later they’re all drinking beer.”
Later, the gang asks Johnny what to do with the bar. “Burn it down,” he fires back nonchalantly.
