There’s a moment in Jeff Nichols’ 60s-set hymn to open roads, purring carburettors and bad boys in leather jackets where Jodie Comer’s Kathy reluctantly gets on the back of a gleaming Harley belonging to Austin Butler’s wildcard biker Benny. As she clings to his denim jacket and he guns the hog over the rise of a highway bridge at midnight, his gang appears behind them, headlamps twinkling, engines roaring, while The Shangri-Las duskily sing, ‘Out in the street’… It’s an image and feeling seemingly transposed directly from the pages of Danny Lyon’s seminal photobook, The Bikeriders – a tome Nichols discovered on the floor of his brother’s bedroom as a teen and has been hankering to make into a film ever since.
‘It was the most complete view of a subculture I’d ever seen,’ he told Total Film in October last year. ‘It honestly felt like ingredients or instructions to go and make a movie.’
It’s also a scene that marks the liminal moment Kathy – and audiences – buy into the inherent coolness of bikers and the seductive lure of Benny, a man she’ll fight to keep when gang leader Johnny (Tom Hardy) exerts his own pull on him.
Audiences in Telluride, where the film premiered last year, were certainly along for the ride as reviews praised the consolidation of Comer and Butler as bona fide movie stars – her flexing an awards-worthy idiolectic Chicago accent and him smoking, literally and figuratively. Unable to promote the film at the time due to strikes, to unpick the timeless attraction of on-screen bikers that has fascinated movie fans since Marlon Brando popped on the leathers…
