Review: 'The Bikeriders' is a glossy but shallow look at '60s motorcycle gangs, with Austin Butler's charisma giving the movie its fuel

Because it’s based on a book of photography, perhaps it’s inevitable that “The Bikeriders” is all enigmatic images on the surface and not much going on beneath.

It’s surprising, though, because the film’s writer-director, Jeff Nichols, has proved with such movies as “Take Shelter,” “Mud,” “Midnight Special” and “Loving” that he’s very good at drilling down to find something deeply human in his subject matter.

“The Bikeriders” is about the birth of a motorcycle gang in the Midwest, shown here from the mid-1960s to 1973. (The book, by photojournalist Danny Lyon, spanned 1963 to 1967.) The leader, Johnny (Tom Hardy), isn’t your rebel stereotype — he’s a dirt-bike racer with a wife and daughters, and is inspired by seeing Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” to starting the Vandals, a Chicago motorcycle club.

Johnny gathers a group of like-minded motorcycle riders, and the most hardcore of his group is Benny, played by Austin Butler. Benny is one of the few in the club who wears his Vandals colors when he’s not with the group — which, in the movie’s prologue, leads to him getting severely beaten by the regulars in a local bar. However, when Johnny finds out, the Vandals show up en masse, a show of strength that terrifies the bar owner and even the local cops.

Benny’s mysterious vibe and, let’s face it, smoking hot looks soon attract the attention of Kathy (Jodie Comer), whose interviews with the movie’s Danny Lyon (Mike Faist) form the movie’s constant and somewhat grating narration. (Nichols, or somebody, should have told the English-born Comer to ease off on the Midwestern accent.) 

Nichols’ script captures the motorcycle life in episodes, whether it’s the Vandals getting drunk and getting in fights, or Johnny answering a challenge to his leadership with the question “fists or knives?” One of the ironies Kathy notes of the Vandals’ existence is that a group formed to break all the rules sets up so many rules for itself, and violating even one of them leads to harsh consequences.

Hardy, as always, gives a compelling performance as Johnny, a man seemingly so enraptured by his Brando inspiration that he’s built a life around it. He’s bolstered by a strong ensemble cast playing members of the group, namely Boyd Holbrook as their top mechanic, Damon Herriman as Johnny’s right-hand man, and Michael Shannon (a Nichols regular) as one of the club’s more unhinged members.

And in a movie where inscrutable beauty is the point, Austin Butler is a gift from the gods. That mix of sex appeal and menace that Butler displayed as Elvis or in “Dune: Part Two” coalesces to perfection in Benny, a man so effortlessly cool that it’s a given that a woman like Comer’s Kathy would end up with him. In the film’s final moments, as an older Benny looks up and contemplates what once was, Butler’s sly look says more than the previous 100 minutes of “The Bikeriders” tried to get across about the motorcycle life. 

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‘The Bikeriders’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, violence, some drug use and brief sexuality. Running time: 116 minutes.