The Bikeriders

The "Wisdom" of the Tribe ("Whatta Ya Got?")

or

"It'd Be Funny If It Weren't So Tragic..."
 

Look. I get it.

 

I blog about movies because I love it. So, of course, I joined a movie-loving-cluster of bloggers—The Large Association of Movie Blogs (I've participated in a podcast for them about this very movie) and there is comfort there. It's a joy to commiserate with other people—of other ages, of other backgrounds, from other countries—who share a love of movies. We all have opinions. Sometimes we don't agree, and you can ignore that or you can learn from the different perspective. It's all about the process of understanding this thing you love. There's safety there, too. Sometimes you can share something in those discussions that it would be a fool's errand to try to communicate with your family and friends. For most of them, "movies" is something to do on a date-night, or when you want to just 'veg'. The last thing they want to do is to study the film and try to find out why (or why not) it communicates its message. For others, that's like assigning yourself homework. For me, it's something I "gotta" do.

 

So, here's The Bikeriders, written and directed by Jeff Nichols. It's a movie about a motorcycle club—the Vandals MC —that operated (in its hey-day) between 1965 and 1973, and was immortalized by the picture book of the same name by Danny Lyons.

It's a movie about a motorcycle gang. Haven't we seen enough movies (and bad ones) about those?

Sure. But, this is Jeff Nichols, one my favorites of the "younger" crop of directors, and his subjects are interesting, and if they're not box-office sure-things, they're at least interesting in the way he presents them. He made Mud, Take Shelter, Midnight Special, and Loving, all movies I'd recommend seeing (especially Loving) because of the way he tells stories so well. All his movies are about ostracized outsiders, and The Bikeriders is no exception.

We first meet Benny (Austin Butler) quite a ways into the story, but this is like a thesis statement for the movie. He's sitting in a bar, smoking, drinking, minding his own business. Then two beefy "townies" walk into the bar and object to the fact that Benny is wearing "colors"—his motorcycle jacket—and suggest that he take it off. Benny—as in the way of movie bikers—looks from one of the guys to the others—clenches his jaw and says "You'd have to kill me to get this fuckin' jacket off." 

So, there's a fight, seeing as there's no negotiation between the parties. It starts in the bar, then goes outside. It's starts as a fistfight, then Benny pulls out a knife and slashes one of the guys' face, then the other grabs a shovel and swings it at his head.

Just before it connects—and it IS going to connect—Nichols freeze-frames and we begin the movie proper with an interview (we're still not at the beginning of the story) and Danny (Mike Faist) is talking to Kathy (Jodie Comer) about the incident and about her relationship to Benny and of how the Vandals came to be—Johnny (Tom Hardy), a blue collar worker with a wife and two kids, saw The Wild One on TV and, like so many others, liked the freedom of the lifestyle depicted (ignoring the underlying message) and formed the club. It was about how a bunch of outsiders formed a community of like-interests, ignoring the typical organizations like churches, PTAs, and Elks. The reason? They're all outsiders who wouldn't fit in those clans, so why not form their own? "What's not to like?" (which is as much of a nothing sandwich as "Whatta ya got?").

The through-line of the movie is the passage of time and how the group changes, following Johnny's lead, which has some basic things like wearing the distressed leather jacket that serves as a uniform, and some arbitrary rules about being loyal to each other, and if there are any issues that are disagreed upon, they'll have a fight—"fists or knives" is the only specifics that need to be addressed—and whoever wins, gets their way, much in the way it worked in Black Panther (which sounded like a good system in that movie, but here smacks of "rule by minority").

While these things are going on, Johnny weighs the responsibility that being leader of such a group imposes on him, and Kathy realizes that Benny will always be conflicted whether to choose her or the club, even as that club faces challengers from a couple of fronts—the incoming Vietnam vets with chips on their shoulder and a disdain for authority and the young kids who see the power in numbers and want in on it. The "outlaw" mythology starts to get the better of the Vandals and it starts changing as time gets longer and meaner. It leaves Johnny with one of the few articulate insights in the movie: "You can give all you got to a thing" he tells Kathy at one point. "And it's always gonna do what it's gonna do" and it applies for Kathy to Benny and it applies for him to the club.

But, that's about it for depth. Things happen. Things get worse. And the vague rules of the club seem to go by the way-side as its reputation swells and new members begin to dilute its purpose and turn it into a gang. The rules don't apply to anybody anymore. And any good intentions are drowned out by bad behavior.

That's the gist of it. And as good as the performances are—although the actors' recreations of their characters' voices may produce giggles, they're based on Lyons' tapes of interviews with them—and as okay as the visuals are and as strenuously Nichols tries to recreate the books' look, it doesn't amount to much. One gets left with the impression that The Bikeriders is less about the gang than it is about Kathy's observations of them, and that's an outsiders' perspective (like, frankly, the guy who made the book). We see her struggle for the soul of Benny, but we really don't get to know him—he's a James Dean wanna-be—and the audience doesn't really get to know the Vandals—do they have jobs? how do they get the money for all that beer? They own a bar, sure, but there never seems to be anybody in it—because they're a bit of a mystery—and an antagonist—to Kathy. Like Brando's challenging non-answer of "Whaddaya got?" there's no "there" there. And the story of the Vandals is just another cautionary tale of what happens when you don't apply the brakes every once in awhile. Or check the gas-tank.

If Nichols wanted to make a film of a picture book, he accomplished it. But, it's all captions with nothing between the lines and nothing between the pictures. The Bikeriders is more of a scrapbook than a fully fleshed-out movie, with a veneer of remove as he's trying to recreate what somebody already documented—"The Golden Age of motorcycle clubs"...but that age is long gone. Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home again. Apparently you can't make a movie of it, either.

 

But, Nichols is a fine director. This time he merely took a spill. And I look forward to his next one

 

Mud

Written at the time of the film's release....although I've added a couple of current addendums because this writer-director is so good and his work sought out.

Possession is 9/10 of the Law
or
Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places

The last film that Jeff Nichols wrote and directed was the very interesting, very odd, and quite layered Take Shelter.*  His latest, Mud, is part coming-of-age movie, part Southern Gothic, part classic romance and part tragedy and complete curiosity. It features a couple of great kid performances and a top-tier cast supporting them.

Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland play two tweeners living on the Mississippi River. They're a couple of restless kids who are hired help in their families, but with minimal supervision, have the freedom to sneak out at night exploring. On one of those pre-dawn excursions they motor over to an island and find a wonder—a boat nestled in a tree. Checking it out, they're in for a shock. Someone's living there. 

That someone is Mud (Matthew McConaughey) who is eking out an existence there. How he got there is a mystery. Why he's there is not. He's killed a man, who was messing with the girl he loves, and that man has a powerful family (led by Joe Don Baker). He's hiding out, waiting for word from Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and when he hears, they'll run off together, where...well, that's a little unspecific. 

In the meantime, he uses the little go-betweeners to get food, supplies, and word out, that includes to one of Ellis' (Sheridan) neighbors, a solitary man named Tom Blankenship (Sam Shepard), who Mud labels "an assassin." Blankenship calls Mud a liar, making Ellis slightly conflicted; he's willing to do anything for Mud in his quixotic quest, out of a young man's puppy-love instincts, in part a response to the fracturing marriage of his parents (Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson) and his own interactions with "townie" girls, particularly May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant).

It's to Ellis' advantage that he and "Neckbone" (Lofland) are under the radar of everybody's notice, his parents have other concerns and Neckbone's uncle (Michael Shannon) is in his own little world, so the two boys go back and forth between mainland and island with messages and supplies, which becomes increasingly complex when Mud decides he's going to get that boat out of the tree. And when Ellis, in his come-to-the-rescue way, interferes when one of the goons keeping an eye on Juniper gets aggressive with her trying to get information about Mud's whereabouts.

Things begin to spiral out of control to a conclusion that can't come to any good, despite everyone's best and worst intentions, due to the breaking of borders between the insular natures of the players.

But, there's something else going on here that creeps like an adder through the Louisiana swamp, something to do with misogyny. Maybe it's just the timing of events—not accidental as it's all in the control of the writer-director—but all the problems seem to generate from the war between men and women. The women here—Juniper, Ellis' mom, May Pearl—have an edge of capriciousness and undependability (in the males' eyes, anyway) that derails their plans and dreams. 

The men are hardly blameless, going through their lives with their eyes wide shut, totally aware that the women in their lives may prove disastrous in the short term, while they're quixotically playing the hero or the rescuer, anyway. Everybody has some romantic view of life that is not theirs, and their pursuit of it proves their undoing. One leaves the theater with the sense of a good story well told, but with a stake through the heart in the futility of good intentions. One wants the waters of life to be smooth and transparent, but the reality of it is that it's the consistency of the movie's title.

It's a beautiful film, too. Beautifully shot by Adam Stone. 

2021 note: Nichols hasn't made a film since this one and that's a real shame. He's been working on one film, but has been hired by John Krasinski to make A Quiet Place, Part III. Well, whatever gets him back behind the camera. His work is too good not to be making something. Whatever it is, it is of worth.

* I should mention here in 2021 that he's also made a couple other film's I've loved—2016's Midnight Special and the same year, Loving.

Take Shelter

Written at the time of the film's release

Riders on the Storm
or
"Take Care of Your Family.  Handle Your Business."

The Laforches, Curtis (Michael Shannon) and Sam (Jessica Chastain) are re-united in the evening—he from his construction job, she from her consignment cottage-business and taking care of their daughter Hanna. They hold each other in the doorway of their daughter's room, as the child sleeps soundly. And even though their daughter is deaf, they still speak in hushed tones. "I still take my boots off before I come in the house," he says, wondering at the extra precaution.

"I still whisper," she murmurs, smilingly, in reply.

It's a lovely little scene in a resolutely controlled horror film.* But, it's emblematic of the themes of Take Shelter as a whole.  Curtis and Sam are made for each other, protecting their family, even unnecessarily. They just approach it from different ways. "You've got a good life, Curtis," says his friend and co-worker, Dewart (Shea Whigham). "That's the best compliment. Look at a man's life and say that he's doing everything right."

Yep.  But that good life is about to be tested.  And woe to the prophet who sees things no one else can, be they Moses, Jor-El, Melanie Daniels, Roy Neary, or Dr. Miles J. Bennell. Despite their special knowledge, they are, at best, ignored, and, at worst, (well, aside from their planet blowing up), shunned and reviled...from those who do not see and are deaf to his warnings. Nobody likes a party-pooper, however good their intentions.  And that "special knowledge" will test the best of marriages and relationships.** Especially when it comes to family.  He's doing crazy stuff to protect them, and she's wondering if he's crazy and should get out of the situation...to also protect them.  The goals are the same, but coming from opposite points of view. The potential for a train-wreck is dire.

But "dire" is exactly what Curtis is worried about. His region of Ohio is being pelted by severe thunderstorms and even when the rains cease, the cloud don't part but roil in the background heaving shafts of lightning to the fields below.

Then, there are the dreams that involve those closest to him attacking him, leaving him gasping in panic attacks, costing him sleep...and perspective. The dreamscapes become more and more...uh, nightmarish as torrential rains obscure vision, townies become zombie-like predators and the laws of Nature are supplanted by cheap courtroom theatrics, birds, reflecting the odd flying patterns seen in his real life, rush in a fevered frenzy and begin dropping out of the sky, dead. The rain becomes oily, then God knows what will happen.

But only God. Curtis' visions doesn't extend that far.

Of course, he could merely be going crazy, like his wife and neighbors think, especially when he spends a lot of money and risks his job to expand the storm shelter out back. And, then, there's his family history—his mother (Kathy Baker) was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when she was Curtis' age. Maybe pills will stop the oncoming onslaught if it is only in his mind.

But what if it doesn't? 

Take Shelter is discomfiting, just as Hitchcock's The Birds is. No explanation is made and one is kept guessing throughout. And writer-director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) manages to, again, take a simple idea, and expand it to feature length, keeping the film centered on human drama rather than ignoring the potential of the story with empty spectacle.

Shannon delivers a dangerously controlled performance that only snaps into a rant at one particularly inappropriate moment.  And Jessica Chastain continues her roll of extraordinary movie-choices and making her parts uniquely her own, not unlike her co-star from The Help, Sissy Spacek.  All in all, an interesting exercise in dread.

>* I use the term advisedly, as Take Shelter is an "Environmental Horror" film, in the same genus as Hitchcock's The Birds, or M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening.  There are no slashings, and hardly any blood is spilled, but it does mess with your head and keep you guessing.  Oh, yes it does.

** Think of the Nativity, and the conversation that ensued when Mary told Joseph "I'm pregnant and God did it.  Oh...and Merry Christmas."

Don't Make a Scene: Loving (2016)

The Set-up: I have this little test. I do it every so often. When I get to know a young person, millennial or not, I ask them if they know what "miscegenation" means. 

The last few years, nobody's known. And they ask me what does it mean, and I tell them it's not important, that's it's a "dead" word and it deserves to die and stay dead, never to be uttered by another human being for the rest of time.

It is almost inconceivable to me that until 1967, fully one-third of the United States had laws on the books against "mixed race" marriages. It was illegal in a third of the country. And it took the Supreme Court of the United States to make those laws unconstitutional...which they did in 1967,* on the appeal of a case with the entirely appropriate title "Loving vs. Virginia".

Because the name of the couple convicted of a "mixed race" marriage was Loving. Richard and Mildred Jeter Loving.

And they took the steps. They took the actions. They suffered the consequences. They fought the fight. They won the right to be married without being arrested because of it.

It's a great story and a great movie that I highly recommend and when I saw it, this scene hit me right in the gut and brought tears to my eyes. That doesn't happen much. But, the simplicity of the scene and its words just moved me.

But, here's an aside. At the time that decision happened, there lived a boy who was (and still is) the product of one of these "mixed race" marriages that was illegal in one third of the country, and 32 years later that child, named Barack Obama, was sworn in as President of the United States...of all the United States. 32 years. That's a generation. A single generation.

It seems like change doesn't happen quickly enough, and it can't happen quickly enough on things like basic human issues and the elimination of old ideas and prejudices. That usually takes evolution and extinction and that's a long process.

But one generation? There are times when this country which, if you listen to the news (I don't care what channel you listen to), every day seems threatening to back-slide into the Dark Ages, amazes me and makes me proud. 

This is one of those instances.

When, in "Loving vs. Virginia," the Law took the side of "Loving."

The Story: Loving tells the story of Richard and Mildred Loving (played by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) who get married in Washington D.C., despite both living in Virginia, owing to its racial laws. Knowing they can't live in Virginia, lest they be arrested they live in Washington, but Mildred longs to move back to Virginia, back to the country. Finally, she writes a letter to the Attorney General and is referred to the ACLU. Their lawyers (Nick Kroll and Jon Bass), having spent months winding its way through the court system, finally have some good news.   


Action.

154 EXT. KING AND QUEEN COUNTY FARMHOUSE - DAY 154 

The ground is covered in snow. The fields and trees are all white with ice. 

Richard crunches across the yard to a wood pile and begins gathering up a stack. A shiny black Lincoln is parked in the yard.

155 INT. KING AND QUEEN COUNTY FARMHOUSE/KITCHEN - DAY 155 

Richard enters the kitchen with the wood. 

Bernie and Phil are seated at the kitchen table across from Mildred.

Bernie sips a hot cup of coffee. 

BERNIE COHEN: It’s very good. 

Richard adds the wood to the stove and takes a seat at the table next to Mildred.

Bernie can’t contain his smile. 

BERNIE COHEN (CONT’D) So I have some really... 

BERNIE COHEN: ...terrific news. The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to hear our case. 

MILDRED: Oh! 
Mildred’s hands go to her face, ecstatic. 

PHIL HIRSCHKOP: Of course, the state of Virginia will mount their defense,

PHIL HIRSCKOP:...but we are feeling very good about our chances here. You’ve got the full weight of the ACLU behind this. 

MILDRED: It’s a miracle. 

Mildred grabs Richard’s hand. Richard has not moved, nor smiled. 

RICHARD: What’s their defense? 

BERNIE COHEN: I’m sorry? 
88. 

RICHARD: Virginia. 

RICHARD: How are they gonna defend what they done to us? 

BERNIE COHEN: I guess we won’t really know... 

BENIE COHEN: ...until the hearing, but it’s expected they’ll use a defense similar to something they’ve used before. 

RICHARD: And what’s that? 

Bernie looks to Phil. They realize they can’t avoid it. 

PHIL HIRSCHKOP: It’s your kids. 

RICHARD: Our kids? 

BERNIE COHEN: Yes. The state of Virginia will argue that it’s unfair to bring children of mixed race into the world. 

BERNIE COHEN: They believe they are bastards. 

Richard stares at Bernie on this point. It’s rare for him to make this much eye contact. 

Bernie looks down. 

After a moment, Bernie tries to pick things up. 

BERNIE COHEN (CONT’D) Now, as the defendants in this case, you both are allowed to come hear the arguments. 

RICHARD: No. 

RICHARD: We won’t need to do that. 

BERNIE COHEN: Well it’s a very big honor to sit in front of the Supreme Court. Very... 

BERNIE COHEN: ...few people... 
RICHARD: No. 

RICHARD: That’s fine. 

RICHARD: Scuse me. 

Richard stands and leaves the room. 

Bernie looks at Mildred, who just smiles. 
BERNIE COHEN: Mildred? 
89. 

MILDRED: I wouldn’t go without him. 

156 EXT. KING AND QUEEN COUNTY FARMHOUSE - DAY 156 

Richard stands on the porch smoking a cigarette. He looks out over the cold landscape. 

Bernie exits the house and takes a place on the steps. 

BERNIE COHEN: You know, Richard, it’s of course up to you not to attend, but you should know, the Supreme Court only hears maybe 1 out of 400 cases. 

BERNIE COHEN: It’s historic. 

RICHARD: Thank you Mr. Cohen. 

Bernie is stumped. 

BERNIE COHEN: Well. Is there anything you want me to tell them, and of course by them I mean the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States? 

Richard thinks on this for awhile. He nods. 

RICHARD: Yeah. 

RICHARD: Tell the judge, tell the judge I love my wife. 

This strikes Bernie. He understands Richard, possibly for the first time.

Loving

Words by Jeff Nichols

Pictures by Adam Stone and Jeff Nichols

Loving is available on DVD and Blu-Ray by Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.

 
* By the way, "Loving Day" is June 12th, the anniversary of that Supreme Court decision—I was going to say "landmark" Supreme Court decision, but decency of any kind should not be a "landmark"—it falls on a Friday this year, and is celebrated by many cities throughout the country and so I chose to do this "Don't Make a Scene" in February, the month of lovers. If it were up to me, Valentine's Day would be moved from February 14th to June 12th.