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.
The latent but blatant queerness of biker iconography was finally brought to the surface in Kenneth Anger’s genuinely iconic 1963 short Scorpio Rising (Internet Archive), a feverish assault of imagery in thrall to flesh and chrome and masculine community of the Tom of Finland variety. The next year, the landmark British indie The Leather Boys offered a more grounded kitchen-sink portrayal of male desire within the biker scene, centred on a notionally straight hero in conflicted denial about his gay best friend. Perhaps because the country simply runs out of road too soon, biker movies remain a British rarity – Mod touchstone Quadrophenia (1979) downsized to scooters instead, losing a lot of menace in the process.
While a leathered-up Mel Gibson in Mad Max: The Road Warrior (1981) took the biker movie into the apocalyptic future, it became a generally retro-minded genre – beginning with Kathryn Bigelow’s scuzzy, mood-driven 1981 debut The Loveless, a naked homage to The Wild One that sees a young Willem Dafoe giving his best Brando scowl. Walter Salles’s young Che Guevara biopic The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) is an absorbing road movie steeped in sepia-tinted respectability, though there was more of an agitated rebel yell to Derek Cianfrance’s underrated The Place Beyond the Pines, starring a bleach-blond Ryan Gosling as a motorcycle stunt rider living a life of practical, family-serving crime.
Finally, Anthony Hopkins in The World’s Fastest Indian (2005) – rather like June Squibb in the recently-in-cinemas Thelma – took this throwback genre into its inevitable pensioner years, with its sentimental, never-too-late true story of a New Zealander crossing the globe to feed his need for speed. Perhaps there’s hope for me yet.
Also new on streaming and DVD
The Beast French iconoclast Bertrand Bonello’s loose, time-bending interpretation of Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle sees Léa Seydoux and George MacKay pursuing each other across several eras, as buttoned-up belle époque romance spills into the today’s age of the “incel”. Many deem it brilliant, though I found it airless and endless. It’s worth seeing where you land.
Fast Charlie Veteran Australian director Philip Noyce turns in a zippy, unpretentious hitman caper that proves an ideal vehicle for the slick, none too serious charms of Pierce Brosnan. We buy him as a distinctly movie-fied lowlife, which is to say not terribly low, and he carries us breezily through its various pivots and twists.
The Boy and the Heron Studio Ghibli cultists have been impatiently awaiting the home-entertainment release of anime master Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning fantasy, which matches a veritable cascade of dream-ready imagery to opaquely staggered storytelling that will either sweep you up into its dizzy flight or leave you on the ground, dazzled but bemused.
All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified
