Not-So-Easy Riders

Hero Image

Title

Not So Easy Riders

Subhead

By Ben Elliott

Body Block 1

Motorcycles are synonymous with freedom — especially in the movies.

From a leather-clad Marlon Brando in The Wild One to the hippie rebels of Easy Rider or Tom Cruise in almost every one of his movies from the last 20 years, there isn’t a quicker way to tell the audience that a character doesn’t play by the rules than to put them on a motorcycle.

But our memories of these movies can be tricky. We remember the first acts when the protagonists drive through open country with the wind whipping past. We diminish the third act, where they meet their fate (which usually involves being beaten or killed by a group of locals).

The Wild One, 1953

The Bikeriders, 2024

These movies are about the tension between outsiders and society and the perceived threat these motorcyclists represent when they roll into town. That we mythologize these characters as beacons of freedom is ironic since most of us would likely be the antagonists in these movies. Equating motorcycles with freedom also reduces the complexity of the characters who ride them. It separates them from their bad choices, which, in the pantheon of outlaw biker films, there are plenty.

The Bikeriders, which opens at The Triplex this week, attempts to ground the motorcycle movie in reality. Based on Danny Lyon’s chronicling of a real-life motorcycle gang in the 1960s, writer and director Jeff Nichols approaches the material with a gritty, anthropological lens. There’s still a brooding sense of romance imbued throughout the movie (especially when Tom Hardy and Austin Butler share the screen), but Nichols focuses on the dark, messy qualities that erode the mythos of the club’s members and reduce them to common criminals.

Now the question is how will we remember The Bikeriders years from now? As an honest depiction of the faults, failings, and appeal of motorcycle counterculture? Or another movie where actors looked great in leather jackets, with the wind whipping through their hair?

Showtimes

Showtimes Freakier Friday | 1:00PM, 3:30PM, 6:00PM, 8:30PM The Life of Chuck | 1:15PM, 4:15PM Highest 2 Lowest | 1:45PM, 4:45PM, 8:00PM The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg | 7:00PM

Marketing Signup

Footer