The Current Cinema - Some thoughts on THE BIKERIDERS (Jeff Nicholls, USA, 2023)

Tom Hardy (r)

The Bikeriders  is interesting almost for what it seems desperate to avoid. Which is it doesn't want to be seen as an 'exploitation' picture where people remember the sex, the blood and the gore and overlook the crap acting, the cheap effects, the risible story line and find merit in other bits and pieces. 

So..tarting at or near the start, everyone who reviews the film goes back to Brando in The Wild One as a point of reference and the famous ' Waddya got" response to what it is he's rebelling against.

But the tone for the genre was set almost simultaneously by a movie and a book. Roger Corman's The Wild Angels was a common or garden story lifted to prominence by the sheer brilliance of its film-making  (by both Corman and by Peter Bogdanovich who did the second unit work), with all the motorcycle riding scenes done without back projection or any other fakery and providing audiences with an exhilarating sense of speed and danger. Corman embedded himself into the Hell's Angels club  and filled them up with beer and marijuana. 

Jodie Comer, Austin Butler

The film's sense of excitement was such that the Venice Film Festival chose it as their opener in 1966. AIP exploitation cinema came a  long way that day.

Then in 1967 Hunter S Thompson wrote "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs". It was product of Thompson's year long close up look at the gang and pulled no punches in its description of drug use and dealing, common violence, pack rape and other unedifying activities. It sold millions. The floodgates were open and have never closed. And Australia has made its contribution most notably through the Mad Max movies but also one of the most famous one offs in our cinema Sandy Harbutt's Stone. I'm sure Thompson's book provided the basic research for many of the dozens of movies that have followed.

Almost every one of them is likely to feature some attempt at least at outrageous violence. Stone for instance  was made memorable by the scene of the piano wire strung across a road which neatly decapitates an enemy.

Toby Wallace

Now Jeff Nicholls didn't want to be lumped into this morass. He wanted to make a movie that, once again, Cannes or Venice or Berlin might take seriously. Hence he chooses to make the film as some pseudo documentary with characters talking direct to camera, supposedly a photographer seeking info to back up a picture book of the gang. There are some violent moments, most notably where the shard of glass gets embedded in a fist but for the rest, like the pack rape which occurs off-screen, not so much and in the end (spoiler alert) the gang leader gets shot dead. 

If this film is going to win any awards it might be for the new category of "Casting". Two Brits, Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer, play the leads and the young Australian actor Toby Wallace, last seen as the hyperactive young juvenile delinquent in Babyteeth does a top turn  as a would-be gang member who, first spurned in a clever scene which tests his loyalties, comes back to take revenge. It's a great entree to a Hollywood career.