The thing about shamelessly borrowing from Scorsese’s Goodfellas is that it works. It worked for Paul Thomas Anderson when he applied the Goodfellas template to the Golden Age of porno in Boogie Nights. It worked for Todd Haynes when he applied it to the classic glam rock scene in Velvet Goldmine (even if he had to mix in a healthy dose of Citizen Kane to throw critics off the scent). And now it has worked just as well for Jeff Nichols in his new film The Bikeriders, which is essentially just Goodfellas on motorbikes. All three of these Goodfellas derivatives follow a distinct pattern that starts in a Fuck Around era (in which they introduce the audience to the power outsiders feel when they find community in seemingly dangerous subcultures), followed by the requisite Find Out Era (in which those subcultures are unraveled by drugs & violence), distinctly marked by the turning of a decade. They all heavily rely on vintage pop-music montage and period-specific costume design to evoke the cool-factor appeal of their subcultural settings, often underlined in wry voiceover. I’m also of the lowbrow opinion that all three are the career-best feature films of their respective directors to date. It’s an overly familiar genre template, but that’s because it’s a consistently effective one.
If Nichols narrows in on any particular element of the Goodfellas formula that other imitators miss, it’s in the second-act narrator switch in which the protagonist-gangster’s wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), highjacks the story’s POV for a short stretch. We get a great taste of how overwhelming it is to be plunged into the deep end of a foreign subculture during Karen’s wedding-sequence narration in particular, but more importantly we get a woman’s perspective on what makes that particular subculture sexy. One of the most important line-readings of Scorsese’s script is Karen describing the first time she directly witnessed mobster violence first-hand, confessing “I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.” Jodie Comer’s wife-of-a-motorcycle rebel narrator Kathy keeps that horny engine running throughout the entire runtime of The Bikeriders, whereas Goodfellas only takes Karen’s POV for a few minutes. It’s not enough that Jeff Nichols dresses up every young character-actor hunk of today in the fetishistic biker gear of yesteryear, mounted on the backs of roaring sex machines. He also frames them from the perspective of a woman panting like a cartoon hound in disbelief of how ridiculous and how ridiculously sexy they are. Comer gives the best lead performance of the year as a result, even if she is just a regional accent in high-waist jeans.
Otherwise, the movie rides within the painted lines of the road that Goodfellas paved. The Shangri-Las check off the 60s-Girl-Group-Soundtrack requirement of the template, with “Out in the Streets” deployed as an overture that explains Comer’s lustful fascination with Austin Butler’s bad-boy rebel. She has to compete for his attention with Tom Hardy’s gang leader, who is living out a fantasy in his head in which he is the Wild One Brando to Butler’s Causeless Rebel Dean. Nichols positions Hardy as a weekend-warrior poser and Butler as the real-deal biker rebel that all of his fellow riders strive to emulate. They form a motorcycle riding club in the Fuck Around 1960s, then cower in disgust as it spirals out of control in the Find Out 1970s, mostly due to Vietnam War PTSD from their younger recruits. Comer maintains a “Can you believe these guys?” incredulity throughout that helps keep the mood light, recounting tales from the road to a photojournalist played by Mike Faist, who in real life published the anthropological portraits that Nichols adapted to the screen. From there, the cast is rounded out by young That Guy character actors playing eccentric bikers with ludicrous nicknames: Norman Reedus as Funny Sonny, Karl Glusman as Corky, Michael Shannon as Zipco, Toby Wallace as The Kid, etc. They all look just as great in their grimy leather jackets as the cast of Goodfellas looked in their shiny silk suits.
All of this posing & posturing in vintage biker gear makes total sense for a movie adapted from a series of portraits where motorcycle nerds & freaks posed for still images. It’s also appropriate for a subculture that was so intrinsically image-obsessed, wherein men with regular jobs & families would play dress-up with their buddies to live out the rebel-biker fantasies they would otherwise only see at The Movies. The Bikeriders is not a pure, prurient portrait of handsome men in leather & denim, though. It’s much less of a capital-A Art Film than Katherine Bigelow’s The Loveless in that way, even though it shares its themes & interests. The Goodfellas template allows it to indulge in as much sexy rebel-biker fantasy and subcultural anthropology as it wants without leaving a mainstream audience behind in its dust. It might be an unimaginative way to hold a movie together, but dammit it works every time.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 