“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This is how “The White Album” by the American writer Joan Didion begins, about the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States. Ironically, the following essay has no particular plot. Rather, it conjures up a mood of a sunlit America with dark clouds gathering on the distant horizon.
This sense of fear, like the shiver that runs down your spine involuntarily and seemingly for no reason, even extends to the properties described. Didion reports that the owner of her Hollywood home was just waiting for the prices to continue to rise so that he could enrich himself by demolishing and rebuilding: “This expectation of destruction that was not imminent but still looming,” she says, “made up the character of the neighborhood.”
Literary studies know the mutual penetration of place and time as a chronotope. The special era of America that Didion reports on marks a turning point at which promise turned into threat, euphoria into paranoia. Naive rockabilly à la “Grease” transformed into the grim end-time hymns of the Doors. Sharon Tate had just flirted with Tony Curtis and Claudia Cardinale on the beach in “The Naked Facts” (1967) and then she found herself in the specifically female horror of “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968). Shortly afterwards she was dead, murdered by delirious Manson followers. They followed the confused visions of their guru, who thought he heard the order for the apocalypse in the Beatles song “Helter Skelter”. The song is part of the legendary “White Album”. Didion borrows the title without ever explaining this connection.
It helps to keep this background in mind when watching Jeff Nichols’ film “The Bikeriders”. Ostensibly a portrait of a motorcycle gang in Chicago in the mid-sixties, it is in fact the swan song of an era that seemed to have so much potential and yet, like a Greek tragedy, was sliding towards its inevitable demise.
Like Didion in her essay, Nichols dispenses with a plot. Instead, there are anecdotes, snapshots, highlights of a period that overlaps almost exactly with the analysis from the “White Album,” the mid-60s to the mid-70s.
The first scene takes place in a laundromat. Kathy and Danny are sitting there, reflecting on their shared past. It is a doubly fractured flashback. Danny (Mike Faist) is a photographer. For years he took pictures of the guys on their heavy machines, partying on remote meadows, fistfighting, and in the bar. He himself became a member of the Chicago Vandals, as they called themselves, and adopted their casual dress style and anti-bourgeois cold-heartedness. At the same time, he studied at art school. And because he not only had a camera with him, but also a microphone and cassette recorder, he was able to become a central figure in “New Journalism” with the annotated illustrated book “The Bikeriders” – that strongly personal style of reportage that Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion also represent.
That’s the truth, this Danny really does exist. His last name is Lyon and he is now 81. Jeff Nichols came across the book in the early 2000s when he was visiting his brother, a musician. “The Bikeriders” was lying on the floor, with the photographs of the rough men in the open air like impaled butterflies under glass. Nichols was fascinated, tracked down Danny Lyon and gave an enthusiastic speech about the rise and fall of American subcultures. Nichols now recounted this in an interview.
Finally, Lyon looked up and asked: “So you don’t want to make a film about a photographer?” No, not exactly, Nichols admitted. Danny is more of a supporting character in “Bikeriders”, a master of ceremonies who gives the audience access to this strange vaudeville on wheels. Lyon was satisfied and gave his blessing. Nevertheless, it took Nichols years to get the script and financing ready.
Besides Danny, Kathy (Jodie Comer) is the second outsider. She literally stumbles into the biker gang on a nightly search for a friend who said the meeting place was the run-down bar. The not very subtle advances of the “half-naked animals” that she perceives the bikers as repulse Kathy. She wants to get away as soon as possible to her stuffy handyman friend in the poor wooden house out in the suburbs. But then her eyes fall on Benny. Since he is played by Austin Butler, who recently played the lead role in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis”, she is understandably smitten. With his hair standing on end, typical of the time, and the shirt with the rolled-up short sleeves, under which muscles flex like incarnated coefficients of strength and sinewy, he seems like James Dean’s big brother. He has the same film star genes, but is not tormented by the flirtatious torment of the icon who died young.
Butler’s Benny hardly changes his pretty face in the two hours that the film lasts. He cries only once, because something really bad must have happened that we won’t reveal here. Otherwise he smokes unmoved. He really does catch one cigarette after another, with the attitude of people who swear that cancer is only for the old, while they themselves will be forever young.
On the very first night he drives Kathy home, and she, the good, middle-class girl, is completely enchanted by all the fumes of old-school masculinity, the sweat, the smoke, the petrol, the exhaust fumes. He stops where he is, sits sideways on the saddle, throws cigarette butt after cigarette butt onto the road until the sun has risen and set again, an entire ashtray lies at his feet and Kathy’s exasperated boyfriend packs his suitcase, cursing. The biker’s presence alone is enough to make him leave his girlfriend.
You watch this in the cinema of 2024 and notice: the machismo of the bourgeois terror has lost its appeal. The insignia of biker culture, the dirt under the fingernails, the bar fights, knife fights, the rattling gas blasts have become irretrievably historical for us. This is not a drama, because empathy is the first duty of the filmmaker. It is just an observation. You watch these people a little as if they were extinct animals. Or distant foils that tell us about ourselves in a roundabout way.
The love triangle that gives the film its shape is completed by Tom Hardy as Johnny. He once admired Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” in the private middle-class living room that he shares with his wife and child during the week. Since then he has imitated him, right down to his nasal mumbling. Inside, he is just as empty as Benny and has almost the same strength. His only weakness is that he absolutely has to believe in something in order to be strong. For a long time, he invented the Chicago Vandals and acts as their caring father. In their local bar, he installs a telephone, a kind of private ADAC for members: “And woe betide you if you don’t just use it for emergencies, but call your girlfriend! Then you’re out immediately!”
He gives a home to all the freaks who ride motorcycles and let their hair flutter in the wind because they are suffocated by the American Dream. The crazy people who wanted to go to Vietnam but were found unsuitable in terms of character, free spirits, too proletarian for art school. Adam Stone’s camera resurrects an “Easy Rider” world that is just as doomed as Dennis Hopper’s 1969 classic. In one scene, when the good times are already over, a once wild biker stands in front of a cinema on his Harley and advertises “Easy Rider” for five dollars an hour. Rebellion on sale.
The really broken kids have imperceptibly taken over, the traumatized Vietnam veterans who inject heroin instead of drinking and rape the girlfriends of their clubmates. Johnny and Benny’s time is up. The dream has turned into a nightmare, like Joan Didion’s. “Fists or knives?” asks Johnny when one of the kids challenges him. He didn’t expect what happened to him because it was just too mean and evil.
You immerse yourself in this film like you would in a Scorsese at his peak, “Goodfellas” in the Midwest. And precisely because nothing “happens” in the narrow sense, your thoughts and associations wander. Even to our present day, in which much that was good and promising seems to be turning into darkness.
