THE BIKERIDERS ★★★ (M) 116 minutes Welcome to Macho Central, the bolshie heart of the Vandals, a Chicago biker gang enjoying their heyday in the mid-1960s and early ’70s. The Bikeriders is a fictional version of a book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, who rode with a Chicago club, the Outlaws, for almost two years, taking pictures and recording his conversations with its members and their intimates. Tom Hardy (left) and Austin Butler are members of the Vandals motorcycle club in The Bikeriders.
Credit: AP The star interviewee is Kathy Bauer, wife of Benny Cross, the gang’s Brando-ish glamour boy. Played by Jodie Comer employing a satirically broad midwestern accent, she supplies the narration and she’s the main reason for seeing the film. Kathy doesn’t quite know what she’s unearthed when she walks into a bar one night to meet a girlfriend who’s taken up with one of the bikers.
Wide-eyed and quaking, she has just batted away a series of improper propositions and is preparing to leave when she spots a soulful-looking Benny (Austin Butler) peering into his beer glass while pondering nothing much. By the next day, her boyfriend has walked out and Benny has moved in. However, she’s about to realise there are a couple of unbreakable strings attached to her new relationship.
The toughest and most durable is Benny’s love of the Vandals, and working in tandem with this is his devotion to Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), the club’s leader, who regards him as his protege.
