Austin Butler likes a movie set in the ‘60s, Tom Hardy loves a gangster-adjacent epic, and Jodie Comer’s yet to meet an accent she couldn’t master. All three things have come together in the shape of The Bikeriders, a Jeff Nichols drama about the souring of the 1960s dream and the toll it takes on three bikers. The trailer for it has just been revved up and let rip. Check it out here:
It’s set in 1965, “the golden age of bikeriders,” according to Comer’s Kathy, who’s a biker and gang member herself. It looks from the trailer like she’s reminiscing about this whole palaver with a journalist some time after the fact, and that Kathy was involved with Butler’s biker boy Benny. Benny finds himself drawn towards a motorcycle gang called the Vandals: they’re a wild bunch, led by Hardy’s Johnny. “I built this from nothing,” Johnny says at one point. “This is our family.” (It’s still possible that Johnny’s surname is Toretto, and The Bikeriders ties into the Fast & Furious universe. Fingers crossed.)
The good times start to turn a bit more freaky, though, and the Vandals’ pastimes become more and more debauched – they’re getting into prostitution and gambling, and the vibes turn from Easy Rider to Goodfellas. “I’ve been thinking, I can’t run this club forever,” Johnny says, apparently tempting Benny into taking on the Vandals himself. Kathy isn’t sure about the whole thing but, as Johnny points out, she can’t stop Benny throwing himself into this dark world wholesale: “If he wants to ride a bike, he can ride a bike.” But does he, indeed, want to ride a bike, and can he, indeed, ride a bike? We’ll find out when The Bikeriders rolls into town on 1 December.