At 41, there’s still time for my midlife crisis to take an unexpected turn, but as yet I must confess that I have never known the pleasure of riding a motorcycle. As a London cyclist I can’t exactly claim danger avoidance as a reason, and as a keen driver I’d love to feel the open road minus the sensation barriers of doors and a windscreen. Still, biking is one of those things that movies have rendered so untouchably cool that real life can only make it less so – and even on my best day I’m not going to resemble midcentury Marlon Brando in head-to-toe leather.
Nor Austin Butler and Tom Hardy, for that matter, though while Jeff Nichols’s very entertaining The Bikeriders, now on VOD, to some extent continues cinema’s love affair with handsome, squinting men astride their two-wheel steeds, it deromanticises the scene a bit. Set between the mid-60s and early 70s, it chronicles the evolution of a Chicago biker gang from a mindset of simple, stick-it-to-the-man rebellion to a more directionless, Vietnam-soured atmosphere of crime and violence – and the dogged efforts of Jodie Comer’s disillusioned biker wife to domesticate her tarmac-addicted man. Whatever macho wish-fulfilment The Bikeriders offers is laced with melancholy.
You could say the same of some classic biker movies of yore. “Whaddaya got?” Brando famously says in The Wild One, when his swaggering character, Johnny, is asked what he’s rebelling against – László Benedek’s 1953 crime melodrama somewhat tidily pits wanton anarchy against honest law and order, but has some sympathy for souls that chafe against the wholesome American dream. Things got grimier a decade later: Roger Corman’s lurid counterculture classic The Wild Angels (Internet Archive) serves up a lot of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll in its depiction of Hells Angels-adjacent California outlaws tearing up polite society for the, er, hell of it. (The swastikas they sport smack of empty nihilism.) Still, the film does rather mournfully wonder what the endgame of it all might be.
Corman’s film prompted a wave of even trashier biker-gang exploitation films – see She-Devils on Wheels for the relative novelty of a female-led version, with a high camp factor but specious feminist credentials. Wild Angels star Peter Fonda, meanwhile, went on to write and star in the daddy of all biker movies, Dennis Hopper’s freewheeling Easy Rider (1969), which brought a bristling political conscience and candid interest in hippy subcultures to the usual genre tenets of escape and rebellion. It’s an undeniable time capsule but doesn’t feel unduly quaint: its own New Hollywood perspective and aesthetic capture an America itself in transition.
