Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Does anyone remember Hollywood? The Bikeriders does. The setting is 1960s suburban Chicago, but the lost glamour of Tinseltown hangs thick throughout. Consider the whipped-cream topping of film stars: Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer. Note too the bookends of classic movies. Early on, a character stares rapt at Marlon Brando rebelling in The Wild One. Years later, a cinema plays the definitively hairy Easy Rider. The two landmarks hint at the whole story: a road trip into American mythology.Writer-director Jeff Nichols also owes a fruit basket to Martin Scorsese. An opening freeze-frame in the midst of wincing violence is the first of many Marty-isms. But where the cast of Goodfellas always wanted to be gangsters, The Bikeriders seeks the version of individual freedom promised by doing 90 on a Harley in a school zone. That wish is expressed in its purest form by Benny, played by Butler in line with his 2022 Elvis. Benny is a Vandal, part of the motorcycle club founded by Johnny (Hardy), a two-wheeled wannabe Caesar. The role gives Hardy the chance to do a voice, as all Hardy roles must. And then there is Comer, playing Kathy, the likeable young woman drawn into the Vandals’ orbit after a biker courtship with Benny.Bemoaning the bad habits of her eventual husband’s friends, Kathy connects their world and ours. A second normie enters too. Mike Faist is Danny Lyon, the real photojournalist whose 1968 book The Bikeriders documented the actual club, the Outlaws, from which the movie now makes a drama.File it under Sociology and Subculture, then. For the first half, the film unfolds as a drifty tale of arson and knuckle-dusters. Kathy chats, Lyon snaps and a jolly biker tells us there ain’t nothing wrong with eating bugs. His name, naturally, is Cockroach.For the casual audience, a lot is pinned on the charisma of the headliners. Questions arise. Why am I here with these characters? Is there a shower I can use afterwards? The man to ask is Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, Loving), an interesting talent who has now made his best movie. Early on, he seems to simply want us to look at something icky in a matchbox. But the contents prove unexpectedly fascinating. The film comes to hinge on the rivalry between Johnny and Kathy for her husband’s attention. After all, Benny is a closer match for Johnny’s ideal of the lawless desperado than the Vandal leader himself, a hellraiser with the soul of a bureaucrat. As a story about rules and hierarchy, The Bikeriders could share a bill with the Dune sequel Butler recently starred in. Nichols’ neatest trick is judging when and how to let the real world crash into this misfit refuge. The deeper we travel into the 1960s, the more the crew morphs into both successful franchise and criminal enterprise. Cue Scorsese again. All roads lead to a gangster movie.Of course, it takes a rose tint to present the club’s early days as any kind of Eden. Mostly, the film aims that romanticism at Butler’s Benny, the kind of role a certain type of male lead has always loved to play: all knife fights and soulful gazes. As with Comer and Hardy, the performance is at once fun and a little ridiculous. But there is something apt about the artifice too — big-name actors delightedly playing people who spent their lives in obscurity, but who surely saw themselves like Hollywood heroes.★★★★☆In UK and US cinemas from June 21
