The ending of Jeff Nichols’s latest isn’t the happy portrait those final smiles suggest.
It has been a vroom-vroom summer. In Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Dementus and his Biker Horde use their scrapped-together choppers to crisscross the Wasteland and demonstrate their might and mania. In the second season of Interview With the Vampire, the Théâtre des Vampires coven zooms around Paris on their motorcycles, euphorically cackling about their immortality and stopping only to feed on unsuspecting humans. And in The Bikeriders, members of the Chicago Vandals club use their bikes as a tool to forge male friendships on their own terms. In each of the three, the motorcycle symbolizes a freedom of mobility and spirit and a refusal to be contained. And that’s exactly why the last scene of The Bikeriders, when Austin Butler’s Benny is finally given a sliver of interiority and we hear the vroom-vroom of motorcycles looping in his head as he slumps uncomfortably in a “normal” life, is such a tragedy.
Benny doesn’t talk much in The Bikeriders. He’s primarily a figure of smoldering beauty and unapologetic toughness, the guy who sprints into a fight and punches through a glass window and waits outside the house of the girl he’s interested in for hours and hours, Romeo hoping for a glimpse of Juliet. He’s more of an object than a subject, a receptacle into which his wife, Kathy (Jodie Comer), and his motorcycle-club president, Johnny (Tom Hardy), pour their aspirations and their fears. Kathy sardonically laughs when she says she used to be “respectable” before getting mixed up with the Chicago Vandals, but she wants to settle down and is hurt every time Benny refuses to. Johnny wants him to lead the group and doesn’t understand why Benny won’t accept his succession offer. When Benny does speak, it’s to insist upon his disinterest in changing himself for anyone or anything — either for his marriage or for his position in the club. But Nichols’s script makes Kathy and Johnny’s ongoing fight over Benny an explicit part of The Bikeriders, an argument introduced in the film’s first act, amplified in its second, and seemingly resolved in its third, after Johnny is killed and Kathy and Benny move to Florida. But Kathy getting Benny to put down roots instead of wandering further on the open road isn’t a triumph. His surrender to suburbia is a practical yet self-destructive choice, and The Bikeriders is another in Nichols’s line of films about people caught in a shifting, mutating America as the country’s mores, morals, and modes either sweep them up in change or threaten to leave them behind.
Nichols often uses his films’ central concerns — interracial marriage in Loving, a doomsday cult in Midnight Special, religious zealotry in Take Shelter — to consider how people react to disruption of the status quo. Do they try to understand the opposite perspective? Do they lash out with fear and hatred? Do they diminish someone’s beliefs if they don’t entirely align with their own? Think of the end of Take Shelter, in which it seems like Michael Shannon’s visions of gigantic storms and murderous birds are finally coming true; the final minutes are just nebulous enough to make us wonder whether this is reality or another nightmare, and to force us to consider how we would react when faced with such ominous metamorphosis. And of those previous Nichols films, the one that best aligns with The Bikeriders is the coming-of-age masterpiece Mud, in which two teen boys cross paths with Matthew McConaughey’s titular outlaw. The boys are being forced into the next phase of their lives, in particular Ellis (Tye Sheridan), whose parents are getting divorced because their houseboat is being demolished by a regulatory government agency and they disagree about whether to move into town. Ellis wants to be like Mud, a solitary vigilante living on his own on the Mississippi River and hopping from island to island as he so chooses, but that’s a dream and an impossibility. The river is too patrolled, the terrain too dangerous, the lifestyle too lonely. In reality, Ellis has two paths in front of him: to go with his mother to a place he doesn’t feel comfortable or stay with his father in an endangered way of life. Both are shaped by institutions and forces outside of his control, and neither is exactly what he wants.
Take that framing and overlay it on The Bikeriders, and Benny becomes a version of Ellis, and his parents become versions of Johnny and Kathy. When Ellis’s father says to him, “Enjoy the river, son. Enjoy it while you live on it, ’cause this way of life isn’t long for this world,” he could be talking about how Benny’s desire to zoom forever through red lights and stop signs, careening into the wide-open country with nothing and no one around him, will eventually be tamped down. The Bikeriders feels most alive before the road runs out, when its romanticism of the infinite highway and the brotherhood it engenders is most distinct: When the Vandals ride up behind Benny, their engines like thunder and their headlights lightning, surrounding him like a cocoon; when they swarm on a bar where Benny is attacked, twisting the throttles on their bikes to make a barrage of intimidating sound in his defense; when they sit on the grass together during a picnic, drinking beers and chatting about bike parts with genuine curiosity and camaraderie. When Benny does talk during the film — intermittent as it may be — it’s to insist on being treated as one of the guys, someone surrounded by allies rather than stepping away from them or lording over them. He begs Kathy to not allow hospital staff to amputate his foot after he’s attacked by a group of rivals because it would mean he couldn’t ride anymore; he rejects Johnny’s offer of leadership more than once; he mocks Kathy when she demands that he leave the club by hitting her with a “What’d you ever think this was gonna be?” about their marriage. Benny’s alliance is not with any one person but with the hybrid fellowship of the club and the anonymity of the road. He wants to be someone, but he doesn’t want to be someone else’s only someone, and he wants to be no one, but he can only be a no one out there while he’s riding, in constant movement and motion. These are all contradictions that can’t hold, especially as the gang becomes violent and policing becomes more widespread. Whatever idyllic “Go West, young man” vision Benny has for himself evaporates, just as Ellis’s did.
All of this means, of course, that Benny isn’t really a good husband or a good mentee. (I will leave it to AO3 authors to reckon with the fact that Benny and Kathy never kiss, while Benny and Johnny’s whispered conversation by the campfire about who should be at the top of the Vandals is as intimate and soul-baring as either man gets.) But it’s also worth considering that Kathy isn’t a good wife and Johnny isn’t a good mentor, given that each of them try over and over to change Benny to suit their needs. And although Benny chooses to return to Kathy after Johnny is killed, that decision goes against everything Benny has said about how he wants to live; Benny crying on Kathy’s doorstep after a year of no contact is an act of capitulation to what’s expected of him culturally and socially as a husband and a man of a certain age, not of love.
When the film’s final interview is revealed to be in present-day 1973, in the couple’s kitchen in Florida, Kathy says twice to writer and photographer Danny (Mike Faist) that she and Benny are “happy,” but Comer gives the line delivery a sense of self-persuasion. She needs them to be happy because she was nearly sexually assaulted while Benny was dealing with club business, and because Johnny is dead, and because so many people from the formative years of their relationship are now gone, and because if she won the war for Benny, with all those losses, it can’t be an empty victory. But to some degree, for both of them, it is. Kathy is married to a man still ensnared in the terrain of the past. He had once told Johnny, “You’re a grown-up, man. I don’t want that. I don’t care about none of that,” referring to his career, his marriage, his kids, and his responsibilities. And now here he is, holding down a mechanic job — working on cars and bikes instead of riding them. When he first asked Kathy out, it wasn’t on a proper date but to a club meeting; now, all of Benny’s friends are scattered, and the one thing binding them together has left them behind. It’s jarring to follow Kathy’s eyes and see Benny seated in the house’s backyard, wearing a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit. Kathy insists to Danny that Benny doesn’t miss riding, which already feels unlikely. But seeing him look so incomplete without any Vandals gear and hearing the sound of chopper engines in his head, drowning out the conversation of his nearby relatives, makes her comment feel impossible.
A certain viewer could, of course, judge Benny for refusing to grow up, and dismiss his despondency as the self-centeredness of a child. He made the decision to marry Kathy, and that kind of vow should be honored, after all. Yet The Bikeriders, for as much as it deconstructs Über-macho masculinity (Johnny’s inspiration in forming the gang was how cool Marlon Brando looked in The Wild One, but the movie emphasizes that these guys spent a lot of their time arguing about club minutiae and playing pool rather than stereotypical tough-guy bullshit), is also gentle toward the men caught up in it. Think of Johnny’s last words to Kathy: “You can give everything you got to a thing … and it’s still just gonna do what it’s gonna do.” He had been talking about the club, of how it had soured without his full awareness and attention, but here, those words feel like an analysis of Kathy and Benny’s marriage, too, of how easy it is to live in parallel instead of together. Benny is a lost boy, aimless without his wildness, and Kathy’s love is the end of one road instead of the beginning of another; Benny settling down is Ellis moving into town, and both characters’ rambling identities being stripped away is a devastating sacrifice in the name of so-called progress.
Does The Bikeriders secretly resent Kathy? No, because it sympathizes with her immediate attraction to Benny and her frustration with their imbalanced relationship, gives her the screen time to share her perspective, and appeals to our own voyeuristic interest in wanting more of Benny. This final pullback does complicate her, though, from the seemingly self-aware narrator of the film and the guardian of the Vandals’ story to someone whose desire to possess all aspects of her husband has blinded her to his own aches and yearnings. The smile Benny gives Kathy when he notices her watching him is affectionate, but it doesn’t entirely align with his inner turmoil. Benny had told his attackers earlier in the film that they’d have to kill him to get his Chicago Vandals jacket off. Sitting in that Florida backyard, with the dirgelike vroom-vroom of motorcycles playing in his head and his jacket nowhere in sight, Benny’s future and the end of The Bikeriders both play out like a bittersweet death.
