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You’ve Got Male: How ‘The Bikeriders’ Taps into Our New Ambivalence About the Primal Masculine Mystique
Jeff Nichols' film is really about primal male energy, and these days that's bound to provoke a conflicted response.
It seems as if more than a few people don’t quite know what to make of it: a drama based on Danny Lyon’s 1968 black-and-white photography book, which captured the rough-riding lives of a Chicago motorcycle gang called the Outlaws (who, in the movie, become the Vandals), their exploits now presented, in Nichols’ film, in all their unvarnished bad-boy grit and glory. In the opening scene, Benny ( Austin Butler), young and rakishly handsome, is seated alone in a bar, where he refuses a request by two patrons to take off his “colors” (the denim jacket with its antisocial insignia). The characters in “The Bikeriders” aren’t rootless (the gang’s founder and leader, played with mumble-mouthed neo-Brando charisma by Tom Hardy, has a steady job and a middle-class family), but they possess a restless spirit, an inchoate craving for violence and freedom, a need to feel like they’re living beyond rules.
Or read this on Variety