[CINÉMA] The Bikeriders, anthropology of motorcycle clubs

In the late 1960s, a young photography student, Danny Lyon, accompanied a Midwestern motorcycle club in the United States, the Vandals, to immortalize their adventures with his camera and to talk to the various members and their relatives, with a view to publishing a book.

Very loosely inspired by this work published in 1967, Jeff Nichols’ latest film takes up the title, The Bikeridersand offers us a fiction of an anthropological nature on the golden age of motorcycle clubs, before their gradual shift into criminality, at the turn of the 70s – we are talking, here, about the Vandals but their rivals, the Hell’s Angels, are equally affected by this development.

In the beginning was innocence

The story is told over several years by Kathy, the partner of a biker interviewed by Danny Lyon. Played on screen by Jodie Comer (The Last Duel), the young woman narrates her meeting with Benny, the man of her life, a sort of James Dean rebel, taciturn and resistant to all authority, and returns at length to the way in which she understood this virile universe with well-established rules. A paradoxically very anarchistic environment, characterized originally – and in all innocence – by the taste for freedom, lightness, partying and motorcycle racing, and by a strong sense of camaraderie.

A true adopted family for its members, the club run by Johnny (played by the excellent Tom Hardy) has as its initial vocation, in an increasingly socially and economically unstable world, to satisfy a natural community need, in the same way as all the fashions that will follow: punks and hooligans in the 80s, or graffiti artists in the 90s. A group spirit which, by marking a clear boundary with the outside world, obviously encourages fights with rival gangs. The origin of the criminal excesses that will appear among bikers in the 70s: drugs, racketeering, prostitution (often linked to the porn industry) or murders…

America of the Forgotten

Jeff Nichols’ film, fortunately – and contrary to what its trailer suggests – deplores this deadly development, which it foreshadows very early in the story through the parallel journey of a young lawless delinquent, and focuses mainly on the early years, on this revered “golden age” which saw the emergence of these still relatively innocent biker gangs, driven by the sole pleasure of hitting the road with friends. Some will believe, not without reason, that the anarchism inherent in these social groups could only, in the long term, provide the (a)moral guarantee of the excesses to come…

Disillusioned, willingly ironic in the tone she uses to describe him, Kathy is not fooled by the milieu she embraced by marrying Benny (Austin Butler, recently seen in the biopic on Elvis). Through the testimony she gives to Danny Lyon’s microphone, it is a whole America of the forgotten that Kathy depicts, that of the “rednecks”, the “chavs” that the CSP+, the academics and the media acquired by the Democratic Party never cease to mock at length. Familiar with this sociology that he had already depicted, and in an admirable way, in Muddirector Jeff Nichols does not hide his tenderness for these marginalized people who had the naivety, at one time, to believe that the ugliness of the world and its exacerbated violence would be spared them indefinitely.

4 stars out of 5