The Bikeriders would be 50 percent better if Tom Hardy kissed Austin Butler when their characters are conspiring together in a back corner of a party, their faces so close that it looks like they’re slow dancing. I’m not saying this because I need to see Hardy plant a wet one on Butler, though the world wouldn’t exactly be worse for having that image in it. It’s just that the movie is filled with simmering emotions that could really stand to boil over, and a biker gang leader’s possibly homoerotic fixation on his group’s most photogenic member is simply the most obvious way this could happen.
The Bikeriders is about a love triangle tucked into the larger tale of the rise of the Vandals, a motorcycle club, and its decline into criminality as the ’60s give way to the disillusioned ’70s — an arc with a tragic grandeur that writer-director Jeff Nichols appears to be embarrassed by. He does everything he can do mute the innate melodrama of the story by breaking up the chronology and moderating it through two framing devices that work like Brita filters for strong feelings. It’s an ironic choice for a movie that, more than anything else, is about men coming up with a hyper-macho pretext to justify enjoying each other’s company.
Nichols does know his way around tortured masculinity. His debut, Shotgun Stories , is about an escalating feud between half-brothers outside Little Rock after the death of the father who’d abandoned one family to reinvent himself and.
