Jeff Nichols has never been a biker. Or interested in motorbikes. Hell, he doesn’t even own one. But the Mud and Take Shelter writer-director knows what cool looks like. He knew it when he saw Danny Lyon’s book of photos on his brother’s bedroom floor decades ago: ‘It was the most complete view of a subculture I’d ever seen – it honestly felt like ingredients or instructions to go and make a movie’. And he knew it when he met Austin Butler pre-Elvis accolades: ‘There is a real thing to being a movie star, and he has it. The temperature in this room would change if he walked into it.’

Marrying the two – with Butler playing wildcard Benny, a man who fights first and asks questions later – Nichols’ latest film bowed at Telluride to rave reviews in September and is already generating awards buzz. No wonder, in the face of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes, Nichols and team pulled their planned 1 December release date just as Total Film went to press, to try to find a later date when their top-tier cast could walk the red-hot carpets and talk about gunning Harleys along the long, flat roads of the Midwest. Regardless of where it lands, The Bikeriders is a film that Nichols wants audiences to be prepared for, and to talk about now: of the pertinent themes, the talent of his ‘embarrassment of riches’ cast, the fact that it is, well, so damn cool.

Obsessed with the images and interviews captured by Lyon in the 1960s of a no-frills bike gang out of Chicago, Nichols marinated in the idea of turning the tough-talking real-life characters into a narrative for years, mulling it over with his longtime producing partner, Sarah Green.

‘My first thought was, where is the story?’ Green admits when Nichols began talking about The Bikeriders 10 years ago. A producer who also works with Terrence Malick, Green knew to trust the vision of her director. ‘Jeff always writes from what he’s thinking about at that time – he’s thinking about being a new dad, or being newlywed. He was really thinking about groups and cultures and subcultures, and how that works. Today, it’s such a big thing in America. People are quite divided, and I think their identities have possibly gotten a little too separated.’

To explore Lyon’s work the way he wanted, Nichols needed the photographer’s blessing. ‘He went to see Danny to convince him that he should trust him with his book,’ Green remembers. ‘Danny understood that Jeff was the real thing – a sincere human. He couldn’t be more honest and straightforward, and he’s super-smart. So Danny decided to trust him with it. We actually wanted to honour the material, and make something that he would be as proud of as he is of the book.’ (Lyon, says Green, has since seen the film: ‘He loves it.’)

‘IT WAS THE MOST COMPLETE VIEW OF A SUBCULTURE I’D SEEN’

JEFF NICHOLS

With the rights acquired and British producing partner Brian Kavanaugh-Jones on board, Nichols focused his screenplay on the voice that jumped out of the pages of all the interviews Lyon conducted – that of maverick Benny’s wife, Kathy. ‘I just was fascinated by her,’ the writer-director confesses when he sits down with Total Film in London’s Corinthia hotel in early October, playing original audio of Lyon’s interview with the real Kathy and delighting anew in her broad Chicago accent. Some reviewers have complained of Comer’s full-throttle twang, but she authentically nails the idiolect of the woman she plays. ‘We don’t really live in a time when people are allowed to be honest,’ Nichols ponders. ‘Everyone seems to be projecting an identity for themselves that’s a bit polished. She just kind of told it like it was. I loved that she represented the same thing that I feel, which is this tension in masculinity. It’s this kind of pull between the realities of it, but also kind of the falseness of it, and the silliness of it. She’s representative of that, because she’s stuck in the middle.’

Kathy narrates the story to Mike Faist’s Lyon, and is the audience’s guide into the world of biking – a 60s Eurydice entering a dirty biker bar in white jeans and leaving with bike oil palm prints on her ass, and a boyfriend in mercurial Benny. Her hope that she can tame Benny is what drives the narrative, as well as her competition for his affection and attention with gang leader Johnny, who looks to anoint the hothead as his successor. Both Johnny and Kathy want Benny – perhaps in very similar ways.

‘I liked this idea that you build this love triangle – not two men chasing after the same woman, but a man and a woman chasing after the same young man,’ Nichols says. ‘But what if that young man is empty? What if ultimately that young man is not built to bear the weight of other people’s ideas for him, or their needs? So you spend an hour setting up and romanticising that strong, silent type [in Benny]. Then you pull on the thread just a little bit longer, and you see the fruit that that bears. And it’s quite painful, and quite trying.’

‘I HAD BEEN CRAVING A PROJECT LIKE THIS… RAW AND HUMAN’

AUSTIN BUTLER

BORN TO BE WILD

Self-destructive Benny is touchpaper in any situation, Johnny an old-school biker trying to keep order in an increasingly violent world, and Kathy a woman struggling to build a life with a man who would rather run and ride than commit to anything. Nichols needed compelling actors to essay such conflicted characters and he began with Benny.

‘It started with Austin,’ he says. ‘It was before Elvis came out. I’d seen the trailer and there were just enough shots in that to say, “Oh, that guy has done some serious work here”,’ Nichols recalls. ‘The script had been floating around, and it’s a compelling part. So we had some incoming calls from people that were interested. And I knew that I wanted to meet with this young man. And then I met him.’

Nichols caveats his next recollection with the statement that he’s met enough famous people in his life to understand star power. ‘I’m sitting there and this guy walks up. This tall, blond man, who reaches his hand out and says, “Jeff, good to meetcha…” And I was pretty certain I was seeing the most beautiful human being I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t just fun to meet a pretty person, it was great because this character is who Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer’s characters invest everything in. It’s the wrong guy to invest in, but they put so much into him and I didn’t want an audience to ever question why. I think as soon as you see Austin on screen, you immediately understand why Kathy or Johnny want so much from him. Because we all do. So that box was checked, and I felt really good about it.’

Total Film met Butler in October 2022 to discuss the project and found he was equally enamoured. ‘I’ve loved Jeff’s films for a long time, and then once I met with him and I heard his vision for the film, and then reading Danny Lyon’s book, and seeing the imagery…’ He puffs out his cheeks. ‘I had been craving a project like this, something in the John Cassavetes world. You know, just something really raw and human, and bringing it down to a different energy. I didn’t know who was going to sign on to it when I’d signed on, and then I was so excited to hear it’s Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer and Michael Shannon.’

Nichols’ casting director, Francine Maisler, recommended Killing Eve’s Comer, and the actor and the director chatted over Zoom. ‘The way she talked about Kathy was the way I felt about Kathy. She understood the complexity, and she loved her – I felt like she would take care of her,’ says Nichols. He thought he’d done well pairing her with Butler but then on his way through London to meet with Tom Hardy to discuss the role of Johnny, he got tickets for her award-winning West End run of Prima Facie. As he sat in the audience watching a magnificent performance unfurl on stage, Nichols remembers thinking, ‘Oh, I’m a genius…’

He met with Hardy at his London home to discuss the script. ‘Immediately, I was floored by his intensity. He just had a million questions – rapid-fire. And he said yes, and he came to us, and gave us this incredible performance. It’s like watching a tornado or a hurricane.’ For producer Green, the trio were an exciting group when they were cast, but as Comer and Butler collected awards, the three leads became a hot ticket together. ‘We had to explain it a little bit to people when we talked about it – to the studio and everyone else. It was like: “Jodie’s amazing. She’s going to blow up. Austin’s going to blow up. We all know Tom is there.” There was some trust involved, and when we watched it happen, we were like, “Oh my God, this is so good.”’

Filling out the cast is such top-notch talent as Nichols’ regular collaborator Michael Shannon as Latvian wannabe soldier Zipco (‘Jeff can’t imagine doing a movie without Mike,’ Green smiles), Boyd Holbrook as easy-breezy bike chopper Cal, Norman Reedus as Californian long-hair easy-rider Funny Sonny, and the aforementioned Mike Faist as photographer Danny Lyon. Nichols gathered his gang – and 31 vintage Harley-Davidsons – in autumnal Cincinnati for bike school and a fast, cold 39-day shoot in October and November of 2022.

‘Jeff Milburn, our co-stunt-coordinator, really assessed people, because they were saying, “I’m great on a bike.” And then they were like, “I’ve really only rode one once,”’ Green recalls of the two-week biking course. ‘So we had motorcycle training camp, also to bond them as a club, which really worked well.’

Taking long rides on temperamental vintage bikes with tricky turning and stopping distances, the group learned to handle their hogs and live the ride-or-die ethos. As Butler told Josh Brolin in his pre-strike chat for Interview magazine, ‘To get to ride motorcycles through Cincinnati, through these cornfields, it was just amazing. You feel like you’re mainlining God… there’s such a trust as well, when we’d be in these groups of 40, riding bikes down a tiny road, and you’re thinking, “If anybody were to crash right now, all of us would go down.”’

Though having their actors ride helmetless on unreliable motors was an insurance challenge (Butler’s solo ride on his 1965 Electra Glide ‘Panhead’ over a bridge pursued by cops was filmed last lest the actor came a cropper), both Green and Nichols wanted their film to feel raw, dirty and convincingly period. It was, as Nichols puts it, ‘independent filmmaking on steroids’. That meant lensing on Kodak 35mm film and shooting ‘lo-fi’ in real locations and in the genuine small hours to nail the inky black of night-time biking. ‘It was a grungy version of the era, in the look and how it was lit,’ Green explains. ‘Everything was natural. We used real places, and nothing was on a set. Some of the actors were like, “Can’t we shoot this day for night?” We were like, “No, actually, to make it perfect, we need to make it look right. With the grain of that film, you’ve got to shoot in the real time of day.”’

REBEL ALLIANCE

There on Cincinnati’s nippy midnight streets, Nichols marvelled as his love triangle trio worked very differently from each other and created a sexual tension that gave him chills. ‘Jodie, she’s a worker. She’s diligent. One day, she had left behind some of her work, and she had phonetically broken down every single word that she said in the film. You just knew she had done her homework, and had put a massive amount of work into this. Tom feels more like a natural event – he takes a lot of time on his takes. Sometimes it’ll be way, way out here [he waves his hands wide] and then he drops in, and he just nails it. Both have these beautiful results, but you couldn’t get more different in terms of their approach. Austin, he has more gears. When you have him standing there, there’s so much coming out. I almost had to sit on him on a couple of things, like: “No, no, no. Don’t smile. Don’t be so charming.” But that was a mistake on my part, because there’s just intense positivity coming off of him.’

The director knew he’d created a special alchemy four days into the shoot when he watched Hardy and Butler tackle a key scene where elder statesman Johnny makes Benny an offer of taking over the Vandals club. As the duo talk, a seduction of sorts begins, their heads leaning closer, almost to a kiss. ‘It’s yours,’ Johnny whispers on Benny’s lips – and there’s a sense it’s not just the club this man is talking about. ‘That scene was good on the page, but it wasn’t until Tom Hardy showed up that it became great. It was not written that way, and I have to give credit to Tom for pushing it there. It was very sexual – I mean, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up just thinking about the night that we filmed it. There’s an affection there, and it has nothing to do with sex, but it has everything to do with love. And Tom is the one that made that scene so beautiful.’

The biking life certainly seemed to seduce Butler, who according to Green became the best rider of the group and fully embraced the look and vibe of the Vandals. He bought Benny’s battered leather jacket to take home and a larger keepsake. ‘He actually bought a motorcycle there, but then Norman Reedus, fortunately a real motorcyclist, said to him, “No. Get a modern bike. Get one with all the safety features. Don’t do it.” So he sold it back,’ Green chuckles. ‘You get into it, you know?’

With test screenings going well, Nichols and team debuted the film at Telluride, increasingly a festival from which to platform awards contenders. Green nods at the ambition to see The Bikeriders on shortlists. ‘Anything that gets the movie in front of people’s eyes – and people pay attention to awards. And I just think that those performances are so awards-worthy.’

For Nichols, irrespective of gongs, the film succeeds in what he set out to achieve with Lyon’s material. ‘There are these films out there that, whenever they’re on [TV], you can just fall into them. I wanted this to be that kind of film. It’s so beautiful. The people we worked with did such incredible work that I feel that if I catch this film on television in 20 years, I can pick it up anywhere. I’m really proud of that fact, because what that says is that we created a world. And that’s what Danny’s work did. And ultimately, that’s what I wanted to do.’

The key to a timeless film is in the themes being universal and pertinent whatever the era – whether you’re smoking a Lucky Strike astride a 1955 Hydra Glide like Johnny, or watching in 2043. And Nichols insists the central idea of searching for identity is one that any of us can relate to. ‘I think the vast majority of people probably think that they’re outsiders. They feel like frauds. They feel like they don’t really belong. More than ever, we’re looking for identity, because identity is real purpose. It gets us up in the morning, and it gives direction to our days. Because we’re social creatures, a lot of us are drawn to groups, and to find that identity. And the more unique the group is, the more unique our identity is. That can be a positive thing, but it can also be an extraordinarily dangerous thing.’

‘WE HAD MOTORCYCLE TRAINING CAMP, TO BOND THEM AS A CLUB’

SARAH GREEN

While it might mean a knife fight to the Vandals and a challenge to the crown by an angry young gun in Toby Wallace’s teen wannabe in Bikeriders, it can also be the toxicity of social media and defining ourselves by our likes and our curated image. ‘In a world that seems to be obsessed with identity, it seems like an appropriate time to look at that cycle, and say, “OK, well, this is one way that it manifests.” I think [the gang culture in Bikeriders is] an important thing to think about, because it’s a very human thing.’ He pauses and smiles. “And because it’s really cool…’

THE BIKERIDERS IS CURRENTLY UNDATED. All actor interviews completed before SAG-AFTRA strike action