Film Review: The Taming of the Biker, Ad Nauseam

The Taming of the Biker, Ad Nauseam

A Film Review by Sarah Hoiland

The Bikeriders, which roared into theaters June 21 2024, is a film that seeks to depict “outlaw” biker culture for a popular audience immersing viewers in the world of the “Vandals” a Motorcycle Club” (MC), founded in the 1960s. The story is primarily told through Kathy’s (Jodie Comer) nasally Midwestern twang, as it is relayed to Danny Lyon (Mike Faist), a photographer. Danny became a member of the Outlaws MC in 1963 and has returned to conduct interviews before writing a book (also titled The Bikeriders) that came out in 1968. (The film is based on Danny’s eponymous book).

This is an unlikely story for Faist to be able to capture in real life as biker women are notoriously tight-lipped and one-percenter bikers like the (real) Outlaws MC are protective of their wives and girlfriends, even among other biker brothers. One-percenters wear a 1%er patch on their jackets or vests and are the most hardcore of all bikers, putting their club above everything else. Writer/director Jeff Nichols asks for more than usual suspension of cinematic disbelief when he chooses this angle and centers Kathy’s hair-raising five-week courtship and yearslong marriage to Benny, the loose cannon of the MC that both endangers and endears Kathy, Johnny, and the other Vandals. Nichols’s characters don’t quite rise above stereotypes and seem to radiate an exoticism related to 60s U.S. counterculture that has its own well-documented critical discussion. But in the scenes when Kathy vocalizes the complex power negotiations within the Vandals MC and between herself and Johnny, The Bikeriders becomes an intriguing film.

Predictably, Kathy falls for Benny (Austin Butler), the baddest and most disarmingly good looking of the bikers in the Vandals MC. Benny is the unofficial righthand to its aging, taciturn president, Johnny (Tom Hardy). Critics have suggested this a love triangle but it’s not; when the movie rises above clichés about motorcycle culture, it shows the power struggle between Kathy and Johnny to control Benny’s choices in a MC, highlighting the centrality of the coercive power of this subculture on its members and those who love them.

In a woman versus MC scenario, the latter always wins even if it is not readily apparent. Here is a case in point: Johnny asks Benny to show up at a “picnic” (a weekend party in a field) after his foot was just shattered in a violent barroom confrontation with some Italians over his biker “colors” or patches. Kathy, who nursed Benny back to health in a depressing hotel room, is opposed—Benny can hardly walk let alone ride a motorcycle in a cast—but Benny rides the motorcycle with Kathy on the back to the picnic. Citing their mutual love for Benny, Kathy asks Johnny to kick him out of the club to protect him; instead, Johnny doubles down and mentors Benny to take over as MC president. Until the last confrontation when love wins suddenly and Benny seems “free,” the movie’s depiction of the inexorable nature of Kathy’s subservience to the caprices of the MC and the demands of its leader hits very close to home.

Nichols’ homage in The Bikeriders to The Wild One (1953) gets as much wrong as it does right about real biker subculture in the U.S., unreflexively echoing the mistakes of the older film. I married a “Benny” 11 months after meeting him, spent five years in and around an MC like the Vandals, and spent another decade doing research on a women’s MC. Nichols does better than previous biker films at capturing the spirit of someone like Benny, a righteous biker by all accounts, and a category of biker that I delve into in my book, Righteous Sisterhood (Temple University Press, 2025). However, his attempt to turn Benny into a deeper character, beyond his undeniable sex appeal, falls flat because it repeats a tired romantic “love conquers all” trope that is so unrealistic as to be laughable.

Nichols also leans hard into established movie tropes, reifying some of the most troublesome aspects of MC culture such as a near-gang rape scene involving Kathy and a switched red dress at a biker party in her home. The Bikeriders drips with references to The Wild One (even using the same names—Johnny and Kathie) and both capitalize on fears of sexual depravity when “good” white women are concerned, depicting them as hapless victims whose sexuality is equated with cultural honor. The near-rape scene in both movies is key because it means that both movies insist that the purity of their heroines remains intact, keeping them desirable to their male bikers; Kathy’s shocking statement after the near-rape was ghastly. After watching so much pop cultural pearl clutching about admittedly sexist and violent MC culture, this particular viewer wishes the female protagonist would have condemned violence against women and toxic masculinity and not reify the myth of sexual purity.

In both movies, and most troublingly for a movie released in 2024, the fallen women are nearly erased (“Britches” in The Wild One) or invisible and nameless (the “mama” in the red dress in The Bikeriders) while the “good girl” Kathy/Kathies are not biker women and seem capable of saving, or at least taming, their bad boy bikers. The Wild One opens with Johnny (Marlon Brando) narrating, “Mostly, I remember the girl… something changed in me. She got to me.” The girl is Kathie (Mary Murphy) and the scenario was loosely based on a short story by Frank Rooney that came out of the 1947 Hollister Gypsy Tour. No surprise that the account included many exaggerations about outlaw bikers and their extraordinary rejection of 1950s mainstream cultural norms, but the movie tapped into a specific hunger in U.S. audiences and established some long-standing clichés about bikers. For instance, the ‘Taming of the Biker’ formula appears in other commercially successful biker films including The Wild Angels (1966) and Born Losers (1967). This tired theme is so common that Taming the Biker (2016) is Book 5 in an MC biker romance novels (yes, it’s a genre) called The Biker Series by Cassie Alexandra.

This dynamic is not a sexual or love triangle as several critics have suggested; it is a gendered power struggle where the club always wins. One-percenter bikers must choose the club in every circumstance, which Benny and Johnny do for most of the film. In fact, there is no choice for those who don a one-percenter MC patch and every other concern posed by family and friends is brutally secondary. The overwhelming power of a MC and its president and the challenges to that power are spot on in The Bikeriders, which shows them in more depth than the Brando classic allows. This tension and dynamic are what the film gets right—until the end—when a violent act occurs that changes the narrative away from complex reality towards something more like a fantastic cliché. It is the least climatic and most unsurprising of any biker film I have seen.

Kathy’s description of the 1960s as the “Golden Age of motorcycling” is as facile as it is inaccurate. The rabble rousers within the MC are both Vietnam veterans and poor Midwestern whites but the larger 1960s motorcycle culture with the rise of the Hell’s Angels MC and the hundreds of headlines about bikers are evidence of a different reality. As Funny Sonny (Norman Reedus) depicts, 1%ers are not allowed to just fade into the background, quit, join a different club, and/or pull a geographic and disappear as Nichols film depicts, and the California Hell’s Angels were leading the new wave of consolidation, territorialization, and the one-percenter subculture. Ex-bikers will be hunted down and while it may end with drinks and revelry, the fear of retribution is always there.

Released during an election year where Bikers for Trump were expected to form “a wall of meat” for the 2024 presidential candidate, The Bikeriders resurrects the seductiveness of the MC subculture and its problematic nationalism, whiteness, and untrammeled masculinity. The sexiness of Benny (Austin Butler) and his custom chrome chopper is visceral in the film, pulling in Kathy and viewers into a world that continues to infatuate audiences over seventy years after the quintessential biker film The Wild One mesmerized and shocked American filmgoers. While Johnny rode off alone into the sunset in The Wild One, romantic love prevails in The Bikeriders, cementing the unrealistic trope that the right woman can indeed tame even the wildest, most righteous biker and the impossible truth that the MC would allow this to happen.

Biography:
Sarah L. Hoiland, is a Professor of Sociology at Hostos Community College, City University of New York. Her book, Righteous Sisterhood: Politics and Power in a Women’s Motorcycle Club with Temple University Press was released in January 2025.