There have been a million movies based on comic books, a thousand based on video games, and at least one based on a board game, so it shouldn’t be too hard to base a movie on a photo-book as The Bikeriders espouses itself to be in the opening text.
Directors have long pitched their movies with look books that if bound and reproduced could double as coffee table photo-books. Seems like it would be an easy hop, skip and a jump to adapt a photo-book with cool images, as Danny Lyon’s The Bikeriders did capturing Midwestern 1960’s motorcycle enthusiasts. All you’d need to do is write a script with a tight story featuring leather and denim clad outlaws riding aerodynamic, high speed pieces of machinery.
The Bikeriders movie however doesn’t really sweat having much of a story.
Instead it casts a bunch of your favorite character actors from Tom Hardy to Michael Shannon to the good looking dude who played Elvis, and that one guy from The Walking Dead, and that other guy from Narcos, and puts them in a bunch of ultraviolent scenarios.
The closest thing to a plot in The Bikeriders is a young photojournalist is interviews a biker’s girlfriend about his Chicago biker club, The Vandals. But the interview never really goes anywhere. There is no arc of characters, nor lessons learned. It’s just one incident after another without any real exploration of their inner characters or motivations.
Why do all these antisocial ne’er do wells want to hang out with each other at fast speeds and snub their noses at polite society?
Who cares, this movie says.
Instead it’s just a brisk two hours of kicking ass and driving fast. The actors seem to be having fun and that enthusiasm carries over to the audience. Maybe this is how a faithful adaptation of a photo-book is supposed to work? A bunch of cool similarly themed images without any cohesion binding it all together.
