It’s been a long time coming for The Bikeriders. Originally slated to release under 20th Century back in 2023, the studio opted to sell the film to Focus, pushing it to 2024. That didn’t stop it from being one of my most anticipated of the year; a year chock-full of sequels and franchises. So how was the movie after such a long wait? Let’s find out!

The Bikeriders is director Jeff Nichols’ first movie since 2016, but you’d be hard-pressed to call the movie rusty. The film has a wonderful energy and style, one that feels like the love child of Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Coppolla’s adaptation of The Outsiders by ways of Sons of Anarchy. Based on a photo album of the same name, The Bikeriders comes across as more of a snapshot of Americana in the 60s and early 70s, following a fictional group of outlaws in the middle of a transition period.

The club president is Johnny, played by Tom Hardy doing his thickest American accent to date. Inspired by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, the working-class family man Johnny brings together other motorcycle racing enthusiasts in the outskirts of Chicago circa the 1960s to ride together and be general hooligans. The club in question, the Vandals, are ruffians and degenerates but overall, have a charm about them despite their vileness.

We get introduced to the world of the Vandals through the eyes of Kathy (Jodie Comer), an outsider who gets called to a biker party one day to help a friend out. It’s at this party where she meets the ultra-cool Benny, played by Austin Butler, channelling all the rebellious swagger of James Dean, and the two quickly end up getting hitched. While Kathy works on trying to pull Benny in one direction, Johnny tugs in the other direction, looking at Benny to be his successor as the President. But Benny, a man of few words, is almost hilariously indifferent to, well, anything that isn’t riding a motorcycle. Benny is a bit of a hard character to pin down due to this and we never really get that close to him or get much insight into his relationship with Kathy. But I don’t think this is a criticism though. More on that in a bit though.

Kathy acts as the audience, the fresh eyes and full of questions. The film, told non-linearly, is framed over the course of two interviews with Kathy, one in 1965 and one in 1973 with Danny Lyon (Mike Faist), the author of the real The Bikeriders photo book. Many of the shots in the film are pulled straight from Lyon’s novel, as seen during the end credit sequence. Jodie Comer is very much the heart and soul of the film and I think how much you like her depends on what you think of her bombastic midwestern accent. Think Fargo.

But in this world of outlaws and 1%ers, Kathy is the moral compass, doing her best to keep Benny safe and even get him out of the club if possible, which is growing more and more dangerous as the years go on and the gang descends further into organized crime as more vets from Vietnam return home. I did feel for Kathy, in that I thought she deserved more from Benny, whose indifference made it hard to see what she saw him in apart from being a poster boy for rebellion. Amazingly, The Bikeriders never glorifies the outlaw life, but nor does it seek to vilify the original vision of the gang; freedom from the law, to live outside social and cultural norms, no matter how reckless or violent that culture can get even in its earliest iterations.

The Bikeriders features a really impressive supporting cast, including the likes of Boyd Holdbrook, Michael Shannon and Norman Reedus. In fact, with a runtime just under two hours, I actually could have gone for a slightly longer cut to get more time with these characters and get them fleshed out even more. We spend so much time with Kathy and Johnny via Benny that these rag-tag group of supporting characters honestly seemed more interesting peripherally at times.

But as I inferred when talking about Benny, The Bikeriders isn’t really a movie about character. It’s about a vibe, a subculture that is almost alien to us in 2024. It’s also very much about motorcycles and what it meant to be an outlaw rider in the 1960s in America. Like the book, this is more of a snapshot of a bygone era and like the open road, the film is also a bit open-ended for your interpretation. Is the movie a celebration of counterculture movements, or a cautionary tale against living outside of the confines of the law? It’s up to you to decide.

With a movie with so many talented actors involved, the real stars however are the cinematography and the sound design. Motorcycles thunder down roads and the film ends up feeling photographed, rather than filmed. The costumes also do a great job of transporting us back in time, with the leather jackets feeling dirty but each one feeling unique to the rider thanks to modifications and patches.

The Bikeriders isn’t the best film of the year, but it’s a great movie and stands out by feeling like a drama they don’t make anymore. So, if you’re tired of franchises and big blockbuster films and are looking for a movie that feels like it was made in a different time, then this may be the movie for you.