Everybody Wants to Fuck Austin Butler in Jeff Nichols' Goodfellas Homage The Bikeriders

Chicago, Chicago, Chicago

Y’all may or may not have noticed that I did not publish reviews of Inside Out 2 and The Exorcism despite them winning the reader poll to determine which movie I write about each weekend. 

I apologize for that! The frustrating thing is that I saw both movies. I saw Inside Out 2 with my son and liked it, albeit nowhere near as much as the original. Inside Out was almost too powerful. It reduced me to tears. I’m not sure I can emotionally handle a rewatch, but I’m impressed by how Inside Out 2 expresses Pixar’s admirable commitment to exploring the complicated emotional lives of teenage girls. 

I was less impressed by The Exorcism, which I wrote about for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about American movies about filmmaking. When I saw both films, it was with the intention of writing about them as soon as possible, but as it often does, life got in the way. 

I am bad at life. I am particularly bad at the sizable part of life that involves time and time management. That’s my ADHD, but it’s also, regrettably, my personality. 

I don’t want to continue to let you down so I’ve set a rule for myself that I need to write my review of the Substack new movie of the week within 24 hours. I was alone in watching The Bike Riders at 7:20 last night so I still have at least five hours to go. 

The lazy shorthand for The Bike Riders is that it’s Goodfellas with a Chicago motorcycle gang instead of the Mafia. The Goodfellas wannabe is a subgenre all its own. 

It’s like 8 1/2. Unless you’re Bob Fosse on the brink of death, you’re not going to make an 8 1/2-style movie anywhere near as good as Fellini’s epic song of self because that was a very personal, even autobiographical, statement from one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. 

You can make your version of 8 1/2, exploring your undoubtedly fascinating life as a filmmaker (I’m looking at you, ghost of Paul Mazurinsky!), but it’s never going to be as good as the real thing because of the impossible gulf in quality between Fellini’s carnivalesque masterpiece and its imitators. 

The same is true of Goodfellas. Like Fellini, Scorsese is easily one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Goodfellas is maybe his best film. The Ted Demmes of the world weren’t going to come close to Goodfellas in quality, let alone top it. 

Making a movie in the style of Goodfellas generally only makes people want to revisit Scorsese’s iconic classic. Making a crime movie like Goodfellas similarly invites unflattering comparisons. 

Mud director Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders isn’t as good as Goodfellas. It might not even be in the same league as Goodfellas, but it learned the right lessons from Scorsese’s film.

Like Goodfellas, The Bikeriders is a literary adaptation of a wild true story. Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ adaptation of Danny Lyons’ 1968 non-fiction opus chronicles eight tumultuous years in the life of The Vandals, a Chicago-based motorcycle gang started by Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy) following a viewing of Marlon Brando in The Wild One. 

The film’s familiar framing device finds Kathy Cross (Jodie Comer) reflecting on her time with Benny Cross (Austin Butler), a Vandals member revered by Johnny for his toughness, aloofness, and beauty. 

Even more than most motorcycle movies, The Bikeriders is ragingly homoerotic. In one sexually charged sequence, Johnny gets so close to his fearless protege that they seem on the verge of smooching. 

Kathy can’t resist Benny because he’s so damned pretty. Though he won’t admit it to himself, let alone the outside world, Johnny is drawn to Benny for the same reasons. The Bikeriders is an unrequited love story about a man who is in love with another man while still clinging to a Neanderthal conception of stoic masculinity. 

I’m from Chicago. So I love movies filmed in Chicago. I’m even crazier about Chicago movies. Those are movies that aren’t just set in Chicago, but rather movies that are about Chicago. 

The Bikeriders isn’t just a movie set in Chicago; it is a Chicago movie. Watching it I was overcome with nostalgia for a city that I love and I hate. 

Nicholas is a product of the South whose previous films have an overwhelming Southern flavor. Nichols treats Chicago the way that filmmakers have historically treated the South: as a dark and lurid place teeming with violence and unwritten but fiercely enforced rules. 

The Bikeriders is true to the Chicago I knew and, to a much lesser extent, now know, yet it also exaggerates the Chicago elements to an almost parodic level. Hardy’s accent is a good example. 

Hardy took the Chicago accent he developed to play Al Capone and magnified it tenfold to play the most Chicago man with the most Chicago accent in film history. 

Hardy wants us to believe that his character was eating Lou Malnati’s deep-dish pizza and Italian Beef sandwiches in the womb. So, of course, his accent feels like the product of long, laborious weeks with a patient dialogue coach rather than being an actual Chicagoan. 

Benny is the subject of desire, both latent and unabashed, but ultimately, there’s nothing to him but beauty and charisma. 

Luckily for Benny, even in an ostensibly hyper-macho realm like a motorcycle gang, beauty and charisma account for much. Johnny wants Benny to take over for him as leader of the gang when he’s unable to carry out his duties because it’s a way of further solidifying his bond with him. 

It’s a gift and an honor that Benny does not want or accept because he has no use for power. He might not be an intellectual, but he’s savvy enough to know that the most powerful member of a gang is also, by definition, the least free. 

Johnny and Kathy are united and divided by their love for the same man. It takes nothing away from Comer’s performance to say that she channels Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas as a good middle-class girl who gets in over her head so purely and directly that the performance feels like the acting equivalent of a cover. 

Nichols and his gifted collaborators, including Michael Shannon, lay the grit and local color on thick. 

In The Bikeriders, masculinity, motorcycle gang-style is an exhausting and empty performance. The nihilism of the Vandals only looks cool from the outside if you don’t know how empty and sad the lives of these revelers really are. 

The Bikeriders ranks among the best of Goodfellas’ many children as well as one of the most aggressively Chicago movies I have seen in a very long while. 

Three and a half stars out of Five