It’s a measure of how long Jeff Nichols has been thinking about making a movie about the 1960s heyday of Midwest motorcycle gangs that at one point his close friend and frequent star Michael Shannon said to him, “Stop talking about this movie. You’re never gonna make it.”
Shannon was wrong: Almost 20 years after he became intrigued by a book about one such gang, Nichols finally made “The Bikeriders” with Austin Butler, Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer. It was made in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and premiered to rave reviews at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival.
But what should have been the triumphant culmination of his two-decade quest was bittersweet at best. In the wake of the writers and actors strikes, 20th Century Studios pulled the film off its release schedule and eventually sold it to Focus Features, which finally released it to modest box-office returns in June of 2024.
“The Bikeriders” deserved better: Only the sixth film in Nichols’ 17-year career, the film is tough and stylish, one of the year’s best dramas. It drips with the machismo of biker gangs, until you realize that it’s really the story of Comer’s Kathy, an indelible character based on a real-life woman who hung out with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club in Illinois.
For Nichols, the Little Rock-born director whose previous films include “Take Shelter,” “Mud” and “Loving,” the initial appeal was as much visual as narrative. “It was really about the style: the way they dressed, the way they had their hair,” he said of the world he discovered in Danny Lyon’s book of the same name. “I feel like that’s such a big part of the subculture, and I find it especially interesting because there’s something so masculine about a motorcycle club that you wouldn’t think they think about style or fashion.”
He laughed. “But they do. And that’s something I experienced in the mid ’90s with the punk-rock scene in Little Rock, Arkansas. You see these kids roll out and at first glance you think they just kind of bounced out of the gutter, but then you realize, no no no.”
Lyon’s original book consisted entirely of black-and-white photos, but Nichols wasn’t interested in the monochrome approach; he wanted the vibrancy of the color photos he saw in a later edition. But he also had to figure out how to create striking characters to go with the striking looks, and how not to be intimidated by a subculture that felt very foreign to him.
“I felt like a bit of a fraud, you know?” he said. “It took me a long time to get up the courage to enter that world.” He needed to fictionalize the story rather than stick to the real Outlaws, to enable himself “to take ownership of the story enough to feel good about sitting down and writing it, to be honest.”
Comer’s character was a key; Kathy finds herself in a love triangle of sorts, with her charismatic but hot-headed husband, Benny (Butler), torn between his love for her and his attraction to the gang and its leader, Johnny (Hardy). And if the dynamic is charged between the three central characters on screen, Nichols said it was like that on the set, too.
“Tom knew about Jodie and knew she was good, but they had never worked together,” he said. “The first scene they did together was the scene where she comes into the bar to challenge him [about Benny] and say, ‘You can’t have him. He’s mine.’
“I always talk to the actors and say, ‘Who would like to go first?’ because we’ve got to point the camera in one direction or the other because of the lighting. Jodie said, ‘I’ll go first,’ and we were all a little nervous. It was our version of the scene from “Heat”(between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro). We had these two powerhouses coming together for the first time, and she came in like a shotgun blast.
“I don’t mean this in a negative way about Tom, but I think she was so good and came in with so much energy that he forgot a line. And his reaction as Johnny was to actually slow down. She’s trying to deliver these lines and he’s slowing everything down. It was frustrating her, but she was supposed to be frustrated in that scene.
“As a director, it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever gotten to watch.”
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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