For a four-year period, writer/director Jeff Nichols is a filmmaker who appeared on my Best of the Year list three years, including making my top movie of 2011, Take Shelter. He’s a filmmaker I highly prize, so an eight-year gap from Nichols is an extended leave that makes me personally sad, though his latest movie, The Bikeriders, was delayed by a year after Disney decided to sell it rather than release it for the 2023 awards season. It’s a pretty straightforward drama about a Chicago motorcycle club in the 1960s. It’s all about a group of men that really don’t know how to express their feelings, so it comes out as drinking and fighting and general rebellion against outside authority. These social outsiders find kinship under the leadership of Johnny (Tom Hardy), an unstable man with his own code of honor and retribution. Our narrator is Kathy (Jodie Comer), a plucky woman who falls for a reckless biker, Benny (Austin Butler). There are plenty of interesting moments and sequences, like the rejection of wannabe new members too eager for approval for institutional violence. The changes the club undergoes through the mid 1970s are interesting, especially as the rules of the club begin to fray with the influx of new members and drug addictions, and the challenges to leadership we know will eventually end in tragedy and a betrayal of what the club was intended to be. Regardless, it feels like the movie has all the authentic texture and period details right but is missing a stronger sense of story. It’s more a collage of moments that doesn’t add up to a much better understanding of the three main characters. It’s more like a mood mosaic than engrossing drama, so if you have a general interest in retro motorcycle culture or the time periods, then maybe it will cover the absences in character. I found The Bikeriders to be a good-looking coffee-table book of a movie, more recreation than investment.

Nate’s Grade: B-