Eight years later Midnight Special And Lovingwhich already attested to the limits of his cinema, Jeff Nichols makes his return with a somewhat dull dive into America in the 1960s, at the time of the birth of the movement of Bikers and the short libertarian utopia in which these “clubs” of mavericks, before their model shifts more clearly into crime and gang law. Strange object that Tea Bikeriders, a film spiritually cut in two and which seems to be aware of it, to the point of making this split its underground subject. Nichols is particularly interested in two biker figures, Johnny (Tom Hardy), the patriarch of the Vandals, a Midwest club, and Benny (Austin Butler), a young James Dean-style hothead who is among the most loyal members of the Vandals and which Johnny would like to make his heir. One embodies a fairly traditional form of virility (Johnny has a job, a house, a family and a rather structured vision of what his little masculine clan should be), while the other is the personification of the ideal biker (youth, freedom and a life devoted to the thrill caused by thunderous bike rides). Now, what strikes in front The Bikeriders, this is to what extent the film is in the image of Johnny when he would like to be like Benny, while being aware that he is incapable of it. Jeff Nichols has often been compared to James Gray, in a laudatory perspective which could nevertheless also include their common faults. During an interview given to Release for the release ofAd AstraGray thus indulged in a lucid admission about his aspiration for a “ warmth, vitality » and on his inability to touch this flame that he lacks. The problem is similar with Nichols: his cinema dreams of classical elegy and romance, when it is often stiff and breathless. Modesty becomes the alibi for a certain rigidity, however less significant than in Lovingin that it is smoothed by the even more impersonal varnish of the staging and a calibrated scenario marrying a similar structure of rise and fall.
This tension between purity and a certain academicism is even brought to light by the notable difference between the actors’ performances. At the risk of occasionally overdoing his ceremonial restraint, Butler displays a mineral style, of quiet majesty, deploying a playing technique which aims to give the impression of natural magnetism. Conversely, with their terrible, razor-sharp accents, Hardy and Jodie Comer, who plays Benny’s wife and whose voice rocks part of the voice-over story, lean more openly towards the Actors Studio. in its most artificial form, mirroring Butler’s very fabricated simplicity. But if we were to associate Nichols’ form with the playing regime of one of his performers, we would think more of Mike Faist, confined to the thankless role of a journalist following developments at the Vandals club. A discreet, dim-witted character in the background, he sticks to holding the microphone to reproduce in a rather scholarly manner the fascination aroused by this wild adventure.
From this disappointing film but whose crux becomes moving in places, Nichols draws some embryos of beautiful scenes, like the one where Johnny confides to Benny his desire to leave him his throne as club leader. Through a play on depth of field, their two faces overlap, as if to exchange an impossible kiss and confirm a difference – to the dismay of the old biker, Benny declines his proposal. Driven by this strangely disarming discernment – that of a filmmaker who would like to be while knowing deep down that he cannot –, the film seems condemned to scrounging up scraps of contained emotion. Its outcome, against a backdrop of Fordism (a coming home initiated by the overframing of a door, so Prisoner of the desert) and nostalgia for the roar of engines now out of reach, confirms renunciation as the only possible way out. It is ultimately thereby the film finds a semblance of singularity, but at a bitter price. Between poetics of hindrance and young old man’s film, The Bikeriders gives less than encouraging news for those who saw in Nichols a possible heir to great American cinema, both classicism and New Hollywood. Far from the great outdoors and Route 66, the film instead revolves around an inaccessible dream reduced to the level of a secret fantasy, which we look back on with a mixture of joy and regret in the folds of a ordered life. The idea is theoretically overwhelming, but even this muted melancholy seems too manufactured and stripped of the thwarted ardor that it intends to bring out. Clearly, Nichols is not Benny.
