When Leonardo DiCaprio was promoting The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese's debauchery-filled story of insider trading, unflagging self-interest and corruption, the actor was forced to shadowbox against a seeming tidal wave of young people he saw as misinterpreting the critique against greed as an endorsement of it. He was fighting a group so wrapped up in and impressed by their own overemphasized qualities on screen, they didn't see them as grotesque. They saw them as approval.
So after the film's premiere, he reportedly asked a nearby young fan : "They know it's a cautionary tale, right?" Enter The Bikeriders : the new hyper-masculine, motorcycle-gang movie with a title so contradictorily tepid it would be funny — if it wasn't so pointed. The Bikeriders exists in a special club of films that exploit a subculture's wildest dreams to showcase their absurdity: everything from The Wolf of Wall Street to Whiplash , American Psycho to Fight Club , Wall Street to Watchmen 's criminally misinterpreted Rorschach. It's something of a takedown of the very same American Dream archetypes it spends nearly two hours ostensibly visually worshiping on screen.
WATCH | The Bikeriders trailer: And given those past trends, this tension could very easily foul up director Jeff Nichols's attempts to get at the movie's theme: challenging the self-destructive impulses of manhood. Worst-case scenario is that the movie would prompt dads and boyfriends around the world to wonder, wide-eyed, wheth.
