Happy Anderson | Through the Shattered Lens

Taking place in the late 60s and the early 70s, The Bikeriders tells the story of The Vandals Motorcycle Club.

The Vandals were founded by Johnny (Tom Hardy), a truck driver who got the idea for starting his own motorcycle gang after catching a late night broadcast of The Wild One. Under Johnny’s strong leadership, the Vandals quickly grow and soon, branches are opening up across the country. Of the many members of the Vandals, the most charismatic is Benny (Austin Butler), a quiet and enigmatic man who loves his motorcycle and who seems to have the worst luck when it comes to crashing and getting caught by the police. If Johnny epitomizes the leadership needed to successfully start a motorcycle club in the first place, Benny epitomizes the coolness of being a rebel and doing your own thing. Everyone in the club wants to be like Benny, even if the majority of them have more in common with the simple-minded Cockroach (Emory Cohen) or the eccentric Zipco (Michael Shannon). The fatalistic Johnny knows that he can’t remain in charge forever and he views Benny as his heir apparent. However, Benny’s feelings about the whole thing are far more difficult to decipher. As the Vandals themselves grow increasingly more violent and hostile and as lowbrow criminals like The Kid (Toby Wallace) step up to challenge Johnny’s power, both Benny and Johnny are forced to confront the reality of what The Vandals have become.

Watching The Bikeriders is a frustrating experience, especially for those of us who have enjoy director Jeff Nichols’s other films. It’s a good movie but it never quite becomes the great movie that it so obviously wants to be. On the plus side, both Austin Butler and Tom Hardy give excellent performance as Benny and Johnny. Both characters serve as archetypes for a uniquely American style of masculinity and Hardy and Butler bring them to life as both symbols and as human beings. Tom Hardy, especially, captures the tragic dignity of a man who knows that his fate has already been set. Wisely, Butler and Hardy both underplay their characters. Neither Johnny nor Benny are the types to normally show their emotions, which makes their rare moments of vulnerability all the more powerful. If nothing else, The Bikeriders serves as a reminder that both Butler and Hardy are legitimate movie stars, along with being excellent actors.

Unfortunately, the film suffers due to an awkward framing device, in which Benny’s wife, Kathy (Jodie Comer), is interviewed by photographer and writer Danny Lyon (Mike Faist). Kathy serves as the audience surrogate. We learn about the Vandals through her eyes and she’s the one explains to us all of the ins-and-outs of Vandal culture. Unfortunately, Kathy is a bit of an underwritten character and her relationship with Benny never feels convincing. Unlike Hardy and Butler, Jodie Comer never lets you forget that she’s a performer giving a performance. Much like Meryl Streep in The Laundromat and Don’t Look Up, Comer gives the type of bad and mannered performance that could really only come from an otherwise good actress. Whenever the viewer starts to get emotionally involved with the story, director Jeff Nichols cuts back to Lyon staring reverently at Kathy while Kathy prattles on in dialogue that tries so hard to sound authentic that it ultimately makes the whole thing feel artificial.

Just as he did in Take Shelter and Mud, Nichols attempts to capture the unique mythology of the Midwest in The Bikeriders. Occasionally, he succeeds. The scene where Benny outruns the cops, just to discover that his motorcycle has run out of gas, serves as evidence of just how good a director Jeff Nichols can be. But, in the end, The Bikeriders is never quite as strong, moving, or insightful about outlaw culture as it wants to be. It’s a good film but it’s hard not to feel that it could have been so much more.

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLQXUmzXuEo

If you were having trouble getting to sleep around two in the morning last night, you could have turned over to Starz and watched the 2016 film, The Comedian.

It probably wouldn’t have helped. It’s not that The Comedian is a particularly interesting movie or anything like that. Abysmally paced and full of dull dialogue, The Comedian would be the perfect cure for insomnia if it just wasn’t so damn loud. Robert De Niro plays an aging comedian named Jackie Burke and, in this movie, being an aging comedian means that you shout out your punch lines with such force that you almost seem to be threatening anyone who doesn’t laugh. However, the threats aren’t necessary because everyone laughs at everything Jackie says.

Actually, it’s a bit of an understatement to say that everyone laughs. In The Comedian, Jackie is such a force of pure, unstoppable hilarity that all he has to do is tell someone that they’re fat and literally the entire world will shriek with unbridled joy. The thing with laughter is that, in the real world, everyone laughs in a different way. Not everyone reacts to a funny joke with an explosive guffaw. Some people chuckle. Some people merely smile. But, in the world of The Comedian, everyone not only laughs the same way but they also all laugh at the same time. There’s never anyone who doesn’t immediately get the joke and, by that same token, there’s never anyone who can’t stop laughing once everyone else has fallen silent. The Comedian takes individuality out of laughter, which is a shame because the ability to laugh is one of the unique things that makes us human.

Anyway, The Comedian is about a formerly famous comedian who is now obscure. He used to have a hit TV show but now he’s nearly forgotten. Why he’s forgotten is never made clear because nearly everyone in the movie still seems to think that he’s the funniest guy in the world. Jackie’s an insult comic and people love it when he tells them that they’re overweight or when he makes fun of their sexual preferences. This would probably be more believable if Jackie was played by an actor who was a bit less intense than Robert De Niro. When De Niro starts to make aggressive jokes, you’re natural instinct is not so much to laugh as it is to run before he starts bashing in someone’s head with a lead pipe.

Anyway, the plot of the film is that Jackie gets into a fight with a heckler. The video of the fight is uploaded to YouTube, which leads to a scene where his manager (Edie Falco) stares at her laptop and announces, “It’s going viral!” Later on, in the movie, Jackie forces a bunch of old people to sing an obnoxious song with him and he goes viral a second time. I kept waiting for a shot of a computer screen with “VIRAL” blinking on-and-off but sadly, the movie never provided this much-needed insert.

In between beating up the heckler, ruining his niece’s wedding, and hijacking a retirement home, Jackie finds the time to fall in love with Harmony Schlitz (Leslie Mann), a character whose name alone is enough to The Comedian one of the most annoying films of all time. Harmony’s father is a retired gangster (Harvey Keitel) and you can’t help but wish that Keitel and De Niro could have switched roles. It wouldn’t have made the movie any better but at least there would have been a chance of Keitel going batshit insane whenever he took the stage to deliver jokes.

I’m not sure why anyone thought it would be a good idea to cast an actor like Robert De Niro as a successful comedian. It’s true that De Niro was brilliant playing a comedian in The King of Comedy but Rupert Pupkin was supposed to be awkward, off-putting, and not very funny. I’m not an expert on insult comics but, from what I’ve seen, it appears that the successful ones largely succeed by suggesting that they’re just having fun with the insults, that no one should take it personally, and that they appreciate any member of the audience who is willing to be a good sport. Jackie just comes across like a cranky old misogynist. Watching Jackie is like listening to your bitter uncle play Vegas. I guess it would help if Jackie actually said something funny every once in a while. A typical Jackie joke is to refer to his lesbian niece as being a “prince.” Speaking for myself, when it comes to Robert De Niro being funny, I continue to prefer the scene in Casino where he hosts the Ace Rothstein Show.

Perhaps the funniest thing about The Comedian is that, when it originally released into theaters, it was advertised as being “The Comedian, a Taylor Hackford film,” as if Taylor Hackford is some type of Scorsese-style auteur. Taylor Hackford has been making films for longer than I’ve been alive and he has yet to actually come up with any sort of signature style beyond point and shoot. The second funniest thing is that The Comedian was billed as a potential Oscar contender, up until people actually saw the damn thing.

Though it may have failed at the box office, The Comedian seems to show up on Starz quite frequently. They always seem to air it very late at night, as if they’re hoping people won’t notice.