The Bikeriders (2024, Nichols)
Decent. Airless, but decent. Fails to recapture the regional magic of Jeff Nichols's great 2011-2012 masterpieces Take Shelter and Mud, films that sing with urgency and specificity and quite a bit to say about the narratives white Americans follow to gain a sense of footing in a fast-changing world. This has a little bit of it too, but there's a desolate quality to it, which works to its advantage on occasion--when it lurches to its autumnal, elegiac conclusion, for example. But the thing is, all of it is autumnal and elegiac. The film starts with some faux-Scorsese music and cutting, suggesting a fire that never really starts burning, because it very quickly abandons that style in favor of a more austere approach. Hence, airless. How much better this movie would be if Nichols managed tone better is hard to say, but it would've at least had some more spark. I'm missing the thrill of the early days of bike riding, I don't get a sense of how exciting and fun it was, even for the old heads. Nichols is great with drawing subtle performances out of actors, but every bike rider here looks like he is on the verge of crying at any given moment. I get the impulse to emphasize the wet, bleeding hearts of these guys--to deconstruct the machismo and violence to reveal the urge to return to youth. I do appreciate it. You can't start from zero, though. We need an Icarus arc or something, we need to see how high these guys fly before they crash and burn. Some narrative momentum to guide us along; a river, not a series of ponds.
One such pond, however, is really remarkable. It's the scene right after Kathy (a righteously midwestern Jodie Comer, whose performance carries the movie but whose character is sadly underwritten) introduces the pot/beer divide in the gang. We're launched into a house party in the middle of nowhere and it is genuinely creepy. I was reminded of Rob Zombie's Halloween II--the best film about middle America--because of the way it depicts men broken by trauma abusing women, and the horror a woman feels when caught in the crossfire of said unresolved trauma. Nobody comes across as a cartoon, but Comer as Kathy brings a profound sense of despair which totally grounds the scene. That, and an appalling shot, angled upward, of a staircase and bedroom door, say all that's necessary to understand how deep the shit really gets. A wonderful, horrible sequence.
Yet nothing else in the movie reaches the height of that one. Other sequences are either too obvious or too subtle, adding no momentum to carry us to the end. Oh: Butler is great, Hardy is great, Shannon is great--hardly see him anymore, what a shame--but of the guys Norman Reedus runs away with this one. He's the only one who seemed to remember to have fun.
