A conversation that might have taken place at some point in the mid 1960s…
Hey, you and I both like riding motorcycles. How about if we find other guys like us and form a club?
What would this club do?
We could ride around revving our engines, which would be loud because mufflers are for losers. Then we’d go into our favorite bar, maybe play some pool, and definitely drink a lot of beers.
What else?
We could all ride to an open lot and have a picnic, look mean, put our arms around our girlfriends’ shoulders, and drink a lot of beers!
That’s it?
No, we could also get into fist fights with each other for no reason.
What if some guy from another motorcycle club showed up?
We would beat the shit out of him, of course!
What would we call our club full of tough-looking, motorcycle-riding guys?
I have two possible names: the Linoleums or the Vandals.
You have had way too many beers.
That’s essentially the plot of “The Bikeriders,” except that the gang doesn’t choose the Linoleums as their name.
No, they’re the Vandals, and they look all rebellious, as if they’d studied every move Marlon Brando made in 1953’s “The Wild One” and decided to use him as the blueprint of the kinda guys they want to be. Director/writer Jeff Nichols even includes the most famous clip from that movie, in which Brando’s character is asked what he’s rebelling against and responds, “Whaddya got?”
In “The Bikeriders,” the answer is “not much.” There’s barely any plot, though it does have Jodie Comer, who I will watch do anything. She adopts a really good Chicago accent as Kathy, the woman who falls for Benny (Austin Butler), the strong, silent biker. When I say silent, I mean he has so little dialogue it couldn’t have taken Butler more than an hour to learn all his lines.
Comer’s Kathy serves as narrator, revealing what she knows about the Vandals to Danny (Mike Faist), a reporter/photographer who rides with the gang in between sessions recording her on audiotape. At least she’s given a little bit of storyline. None of the other women in the movie has even that. Faist, who was already in one terrible movie this year (“Challengers,” which I reviewed here) is nothing more than a microphone stand as Danny. Seriously, he had only slightly more to do than I did — and I was sitting still in a movie theater seat.
As the veteran Vandals, Michael Shannon (with the perfect moniker, “Zipco”) and Tom Hardy are as reliable as ever, but they’re not given much to do, either. In a couple of scenes, it looks like they’re waiting for something — anything — to develop, but it never does.
Nichols also made “Mud” and “Loving,” both of which I liked. In fact, I named the latter one of the best movies of 2016 (read my review here). Unfortunately, “The Bikeriders” falls far short of that. It’s like a motorcycle with a full gas tank but headed nowhere.
I give it a 4 out of 10. Opens in theaters today.