THE BIKERIDERS***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 10

Writer-director Jeff Nichols (TAKE SHELTER, MUD, MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, LOVING) has produced his career best work with THE BIKERIDERS - a film or rare beauty, nuance and heart-break.  It's based on a book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, documenting a motorcycle club that slowly morphs into a full-on violent gang, much to the horror of its founder and leader Johnny (Tom Hardy).  The real star of the film is Jodie Comer with a flawless working class Midwestern accent, playing Kathy - a good girl who cannot resist the handsome, dangerous biker Benny (Austin Butler).  We see the story through her eyes and her narration to an on-screen portrayal of Lyon.

For the first half hour of the film, despite the occasional Iron Cross and bit of senseless violence, one can't help falling in love with this group of outsiders and goofy ne'er-do-wells. When Zipco (Michael Shannon) tells us how the army rejected him, your heart breaks for him. When Cal and Cockroach are goofing around, it's just loveable silliness. And yes, they do ride around on motorbikes and do the odd bit of in-and-out, but they also take care of their own. They are a found family: they vouch for each other. 

But the club is a victim of its own success. As the members and chapters increase, it's impossible to know everyone. And the new younger kids come back from Vietnam messed up and hooked on drugs. Nichols starts to show us the truly dark side of the Vandals, as they morph into full-on biker gang, complete with violent misogyny and horrific violence. 

All of which leads us to a true Succession fight, worthy more of THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD.  By this point, one wonders if Johnny is stuck in a role he can't escape, in a monster of his not-quite creation.  He tries to pass the leadership to charismatic loose canon Benny but even Benny knows better, and more the point, cannot be beholden to anything, not even his wife. 

All of this is photographed in the most beautifully warm, sepia-toned, lush manner by DP Adam Stone, and the needle-drop late 60s and early 70s pop and rock tracks capture the atmosphere perfectly. But really this is about a spare script that allows the actors to do all the work between the lines.  Comer is award-worthy but everyone is at the top of the game. This is truly one of my favourite films of the year.

THE BIKERIDERS is rated R. It played London 2023 and opens in the USA on December 1st.

LOVING

Richard and Mildred Loving were a mixed race couple from rural Virginia who fell in love and wanted to make a life for themselves surrounded by family, on an acre of land on which Richard intended to build Mildred a house.  But in 1958, inter-racial marriage was illegal in Virginia, so they had to get married in DC, and even then, were victims of local police who imprisoned them and ran them out of the state.  And there they could've stayed were it not for this quiet and unassuming couple's deep desire to raise their children in their home town - their quiet stubborn refusal to be denied their dream.  So they returned, in subterfuge, and Mildred, the more vocal and gregarious of the two, wrote a letter to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy.  This was then passed to the ACLU, who took up the case as a way of getting the Supreme Court to over-turn anti-miscegenation laws more generally.

The genius of writer-director Jeff Nichols' approach is to make a film that is an intimate portrait of a loving couple, and to follow their approach in being resolutely uninterested in the big courtroom drama that their marriage provoked.  There's a moment about half way through this film when the two young eager ACLU lawyers show up, full of glee and awe at being able to try what could become such a landmark case. But the Lovings themselves are uninterested even in attending the Supreme Court hearing.  They continue to do what they always wanted to do - just live a quiet married life in a quiet rural town.

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

Writer-director Jeff Nichols (TAKE SHELTER, MUD) is the purveyor of deeply felt, beautifully acted low budget independent films. He returns to our screens with MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, a similarly lo-fi sci-fi flick.  The movie starts off strong - perhaps the strongest opening of a movie I've seen this year. It's dark, a weird kid wearing swimming goggles in abducted by two men and hidden in the back of an old battered car. The TV news flashes images of the kidnapper.  We realise its a father (Michael Shannon) and his son (Jaeden Lieberher), who's reading superhero comics by torchlight.  But the other guy (Joel Edgerton) is freaking us out. He asks the dad to reach into the glove compartment. Is it for a gun? No, night vision goggles. He's going to drive at high speed through the night to get this kid to wherever he needs to be.   Meanwhile, a local bunch of religious nutters led by Sam Shepard are being interrogated by the Feds and NSA analyst Kylo Ren.  The cult think he's going to lead them to paradise when the apocalypse comes in three days time.  The army thinks he can be weaponised. But we still don't know what he is.

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - MUD

Despite the critical hype surrounding Jeff Nichols' TAKE SHELTER, I just couldn't get into it. It was just so dour, and obscure and wilfully pessimistic that it alienated me.  Nichols' sequel MUD is an entirely different beast, and worth every ounce of praise it's receiving.  The movie drips with humanity and compassion.  It speaks, as did BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, to a vanishing of a lifestyle rooted in its environment and local community on the banks of the Mississippi.  The stakes couldn't be higher.  But to the movie's great credit, it's shot through with a disarming blunt humour delivered by one of its two superb child stars, Jacob Lofland.  That helps to make us really care about the characters, and so to become susceptible to the thriller-like tension of the movie's final act.  

The plot is deceptively simple.  Two charming kids, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacon Lofland) stumble upon an escaped convict called Mud (a grungy, grifty looking Matthew McConaughey).  Ellis - from a mixture of plain decency and romance - decides to help Mud gather the materials to repair a boat and escape purely because he wants Mud to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).  The tension comes from the fact that Mud killed Juniper's abusive ex-boyfriend and his family is out looking for vengeance.  Moreover, at an emotional level, we are deeply concerned as to whether the vulnerable skittish Juniper will have the courage to follow through with Mud.  Indeed, a theme that flows through this movie could be summed up as "la donna e mobile".  The movie is full of  women who are flighty and let down their romantic with a capital R menfolk.

The resulting film has a wistful, darkly comic tone.  We feel the grittiness and the griminess of the locale as well as the stunning beauty of the river. The plot point that motivates the final act is heavily foreshadows and yet the betrayal that triggers it is so powerful that one can't help but get carried along with it.  McConaughey continues his run of superb character roles, really getting shabby and battered for this one. And while Mud is charismatic enough to get these boys to help him, this is no Magic Mike style pure show-man. Mud is a far more layered, vulnerable and sometimes even pathetic character.  Reese Witherspoon is good in a cameo role, but it's really the kids who carry the film and win our hearts. 

MUD has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA.

MUD played Cannes 2012 and Sundance 2013. It opens on France on May 1st and in the UK on May 10th.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 12 - TAKE SHELTER

Writer-director Jeff Nichols's psychological drama, TAKE SHELTER, has been winning rave reviews, and with screeners already sent out to the Oscar electorate, I am sure Michael Shannon (BOARDWALK EMPIRE, BUG) will be receiving Oscar buzz for his performance of a man conscious that he is losing his mind.  But to be frank, I found this movie near un-watchable - so languorous was its pace, so obvious was its plot trajectory.   

Shannon plays Curtis, a hard-working man, whose nightmares of violent storms and biting dogs start to seep into his waking life.  Convinced that a violent storm is coming he puts himself in financial jeopardy to extend and stock up a storm shelter in his garden, at the same time alienating himself from his sweet wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain).  Shannon is always committed and convincing in his performances, but has become typecast as the sympathetic insane person. I also feel that Chastain needs to move beyond roles where she is just an archetypal sweet wife to be adored and put on a pedestal. She needs to break free of this typecasting. I feel that I have yet to see her really act. But the story just moves at such a slow pace, and doesn't really go anywhere. Over-hyped tedium.   

TAKE SHELTER played Sundance, Cannes where it won the Critics Week Grand Prize, and Jeff Nichols won the SACD award for Best Feature.  It also played Hollywood 2011 where Jessica Chastain won Breakthrough Actress, and London 2011. It opened in September in the US and opens on November 11th in the UK. It opens in France on December 7th.