How “The Bikeriders” Tells The Story Of The Motorcycle On The Big Screen

The story behind Jeff Nichols’ “The Bikeriders” didn’t start with a roaring bike on an open road or at a drunken shindig in a dingy biker dive bar. It began on the screen.

Johnny Davis, the titular biker club’s leader, gets his inspiration for the club while watching TV on his couch. On Johnny’s screen “The Wild One” plays. From the famous movie, we hear the now-canonical response to the question what do you have to rebel against: “What do you got?” Davis, played by the excellent Tom Hardy, laughs to himself and mutters something about it being a good line. 

This inspiration mimics the inspiration of the club’s real-life version. In Danny Lyon’s 1968 photography book of the same title, the book that was the basis of the film, the first page on the bike club is a cutout of Johnny’s scrapbook. The two things on the page aren’t pictures of bikes; no, they’re pictures of movie stars. The smaller picture is a cutout of James Dean’s obituary. The other, much larger one is the entire cover of the WBBM-TV schedule, a cover featuring Marlon Brando adorned in a leather jacket with the words “Marlon Brando” and “The Wild One” taking up most of the bottom of the page. 

“The Wild One” is often heralded as the first biker movie – something it’s not – and the starting point of biker culture on screen – something it is. Before “The Wild One,” when a motorcycle was on screen, it was typically shown as a hobby that is respectable and of polite society, a depiction that fit with the culture before the release of the film in 1953.

These depictions usually showed the motorcycle riders as decent, middle-class people – “squares” as the bikers would come to call them. Sometimes, like in “Code Two” and “Full Speed Ahead,” they would be police officers or police officers in training, a profession that during the 1940s was seen as highly respectable and morally upright. Even appearances of a motorcycle in silent films have this positive connotation; see the bike cop in Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.”

If not police officers, the riders were racers. Films of this sort include “No Limit” and “Once a Jolly Swagman.” Racing, again, was a respectable hobby. Typically run by bureaucratic bodies like the American Motorcyclist Association, motorcycle racing was something that middle-class men did in their free time. It was not full of the low-lives and hoodlums that would come to take over the culture throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

The turning point in the cinematic history of motorcycles is Brando’s “The Wild One.” The film reflects the beginning of a shift in bike-riding culture and drives and escalates that trend. After World War II, soldiers were returning home, and those who didn’t fight in the war were starting to grow up. Army-issued motorcycles often came home with the soldiers who rode them or inspired the soldiers to purchase their own bikes.After the war, the general population felt the need to channel the anxious energy from the war into something. Some channeled it into two things: fear or crime. The bikers who channeled it into crime made headlines in July 1947. The first widely sensationalized biker riot took place in Hollister, California – this riot, in fact, is a major inspiration for “The Wild One.” The riot itself wasn’t a huge sticking point, but Life Magezine’s photo of a biker nearly falling off his bike with a mountain of beer bottles beneath him was.

This image is a harbinger of the biker depiction to come. No longer a respectable hobby, riding a motorcycle was quickly becoming the symbol of delinquency. In comes “The Wild One.” Headlined by the sexy and enigmatic Brando, the film attracted a young audience. Paired with other films dubbed J.D. films (for juvenile delinquency) like “Rebel Without a Cause,” this generation of new bikers wasn’t about racing. It was about rebelling. 

In “The Bikeriders,” this new generation of riders is led by Johnny Davis and his first generation of Outlaws, and it’s ended by Benny (Austin Butler), who the film considers the last new member of the club still part of bike-riding’s earlier golden era. It’s important to note that while these club members do commit crimes, they are on a smaller scale. They speed and run from cops, and at worst, they’ll fight other outlaw biker gangs. Outside of the Hell’s Angels in California, the consequences of these bikers’ crimes are lesser than the bikers to come.

After the success of “The Wild One,” more J.D. biker flicks came out. The release of these films peaked in 1958 with “Dragstrip Riot,” which was the B-movie to “The Cool and the Crazy,” a film that grossed over $5 million at the box office. Expertly demonstrating the post-war malaise filled with motorcycle gangs and petty crime, “The Hot Angel,” was also a 1958 release.  

The visual imagery of these films was solidified in 1963’s “Scorpio Rising,” a half-hour film with no talking made up of a relatively inconsequential narrative, in favor of highlighting the aesthetic of the rebel biker. The film – just like “The Bikeriders” over half a century later – pulls in references to “The Wild One,” with photos of Brando plastered on the protagonist’s walls. 

The imagery of “Scorpio Rising” is quoted visually in “The Bikeriders.” The racing scenes early on in the 2024 release feel like shot-for-shot re-creations of racing scenes from “Scorpio Rising.” This homage sets the scene for “The Bikeriders” since “Scorpio Rising” is the aesthetic culmination of the ten years of motorcycle culture after “The Wild One.” Rock and soul music blare over the film’s dingy, leather-filled scenes. The bikers are covered in symbols that come to make up biker culture – good and evil (there’s a horrid use of Nazi imagery for both political and counter-cultural purposes). 

At the same time, “Scorpio Rising” marks a turn in the early stages of screen culture and shows the changing ways of biker culture. By the mid-60s, bikers weren’t just juvenile delinquents; they were hardened criminals—at least in the media. Public outcry against bikers began to increase drastically as they were seen more and more as thugs, as this new form of bike rider began to dominate the subculture.

California Attorney General Thomas Lynch created an extensive report in 1965 about the biker subculture and distributed it to many local police forces. At the same time, major publications were publishing widely circulated articles about violent gangs of bikers marauding around California highways. Time magazine published an article called “The Wilder Ones” in 1965, directly referencing the 1953 film. Gonzo “journalist” Hunter S. Thompson wrote extensively about the Hell’s Angels, with his efforts beginning with the 1965 article “The Motorcycle Gangs.” 

Morally, bikers’ crimes could no longer be called exploits. No longer the kiddie-romance pictures they once were, movies about bikers became crime flicks by 1965. This era of the biker film was championed by Roger Corman, the famed exploitation filmmaker dubbed the King of Cult. It was led by the production company American International Pictures, with which Corman did much of his work. There are countless films of this ilk, but maybe the most stereotypical is Corman’s “The Wild Angels.” With Peter Fonda opposite Nancy Sinatra, the cast was studded with people who can put butts in seats. This period of bikers, especially on film, was more violent, and they were no longer depicted as the rabble-rousers the J.D. period was known for. Instead, this iteration of bikers was considered violent, misogynistic, and often ultra-conservative, fascist, and racist. These bikers got acclaim and attention for their crimes, not their riding. 

This new generation makes up the primary conflict of Nichols’ film. In “The Bikeriders,” this new generation is willing to do anything to anyone and will betray any semblance of values to get ahead. This new breed of bikers is led by a character in the film known only as “The Kid” (Toby Wallace), but these young guns quickly take over the gang. No longer do the Outlaws relax around a fire and drink beer. They smoke weed and do harder drugs, and they fight with knives and guns rather than fists.

Effectively, the biker culture of yore, the golden era, was on its way out, and it was being replaced by seemingly sociopathic, uber-violent gangsters. This new generation is clearly represented in the changing cinematic depiction of bikers. The fun-loving “Wild Ones” become devils – and Nazis. The old-school bikers either have died, have quit, or have been pushed into the background. The era of easy riding had died by the end of the 1960s.

This death is made literally on the screen with 1969’s “Easy Rider,” the last biker film referenced in “The Bikeriders.” Where “The Wild One” gave hope to the young bikers, “Easy Rider” ended that hope for the older generations of bikers. The film, for the most part, is the typical road journey: the two bikers go on the road, meet people, and have fun. That is the case until the last couple of moments in the last scene.

After 90 minutes of riding, it’s expected that they can go home, and when they get home, the adventure will conclude. This isn’t what happens. The two main characters – one, the return of Fonda as a biker, and the other, the film’s director Dennis Hopper – get killed in quick succession, one after the other. These bikers aren’t the 20-something bikers of many of the Corman-esque exploitation films, but rather, they’re fully formed adults, bikers who have been riding for decades.The two bikers in “Easy Rider,” Billy and Wyatt, are symbols of the old generation of bikers, the generation that is coming to a close. Their deaths in the movie are marked after a trip on drugs, something that was becoming more popular among bikers – and something that denoted the major shift in the movement. It was no longer beer and weed on weekends; it was acid and cocaine – and not just selling it. 

It must be stated that in “The Bikeriders,” the only reference to “Easy Rider” is during the segment of the film aimed at pointing out the Outlaws’ changing and falling apart. When “Easy Rider” is depicted, it surrounds an older member of the club who was paid to sit outside the movie to encourage people to come inside. This symbolizes the domestication of the bikers who wouldn’t or couldn’t murder and deal drugs. 

Where “The Wild One” started the cinematic culture, “Scorpio Rising” perfected the aesthetic, and “The Wild Angels” glorified the dangers of the culture, “Easy Rider” marked the end of it. In the same year as the Hell’s Angels’ murder of a teenager at the Altamont Speedway Rolling Stones concert, “Easy Rider” shows that the old way of biking is dead; to survive, you have to be a killer, or else you will be killed.

The narrative of “The Bikeriders” follows the same arc as the history of the motorcycle on screen. The story starts with “The Wild One” and ends with “Easy Rider.” Today’s film is not the story of a club or its members; it uses the club to tell the story of the bike on screen, making room for itself in the canon whose story it’s telling. 

Have you seen “The Bikeriders” yet? If so, what did you think? If not, it’s now currently available to watch on VOD. What’s your favorite biker film? Please let us know in the comments section below or on Next Best Picture’s Twitter account.

You can follow Nick and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars & Film on Twitter at @thecinemacowboy