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Some of the The Bikeriders’ visuals have stayed with me. Tom Hardy’s heart-shaped lips squeezing a freshly lit cigarette whose smoke gleams blue in the dark. A motorcycle-riding Austin Butler flying down a barren highway flanked by fields of wheat glowing golden beneath blue skies flecked with wispy white clouds. The way winged kohl seems to enlarge the ever-present sense of surprise widening Jodie Comer’s eyes. There doesn’t seem to be a frame in the movie where anything, from a scene’s overall composition all the way down to a character’s flyaway hairs, hasn’t been thoroughly thought out by writer-director Jeff Nichols. You sense in that meticulousness that, in this adaptation of photographer Danny Lyon’s 1968 photo collection of the same name, Nichols didn’t want the romantically rebellious aesthetic Lyon captured to be confined to the page.

Yet because image and texture ultimately seem to take up the bulk of Nichols’ energy, there isn’t much juice left for the narrative the film spins: one of obsession and unhealthy relationships to duty and dangerous romances presented beautifully but never very believably. In The Bikeriders, you always feel like you’re being told what to think and feel; the actors never give the impression of disappearing into their roles because of how hard they seem to be working to look and sound convincing in their parts as motorcycle-worshipping midwesterners. The famously eager-to-prepare Butler especially seems most seduced by the James Dean-esque pose he’s required to strike, though I found myself the most won over by him out of anybody because of his inability to let a moment go by not sexily smoldering — like he was on the set of a biker-themed fashion-magazine shoot and was told the cameras for this particular assignment would be hidden. 

Read the full review on the South Sound website.