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The Bikeriders Is a Tragedy, Actually
The ending of Jeff Nichols’s latest isn’t the happy portrait those final smiles suggest.
His surrender to suburbia is a practical yet self-destructive choice, and The Bikeriders is another in Nichols’s line of films about people caught in a shifting, mutating America as the country’s mores, morals, and modes either sweep them up in change or threaten to leave them behind. When the film’s final interview is revealed to be in present-day 1973, in the couple’s kitchen in Florida, Kathy says twice to writer and photographer Danny (Mike Faist) that she and Benny are “happy,” but Comer gives the line delivery a sense of self-persuasion. Yet The Bikeriders, for as much as it deconstructs Über-macho masculinity (Johnny’s inspiration in forming the gang was how cool Marlon Brando looked in The Wild One, but the movie emphasizes that these guys spent a lot of their time arguing about club minutiae and playing pool rather than stereotypical tough-guy bullshit), is also gentle toward the men caught up in it.
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