The biker has been a constant figure of Hollywood fascination — the rebel, the outsider, the last American pioneer — that you might wonder what’s left to say about him. But Jeff Nichols‘ drama The Bikeriders, starring Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, and Jodie Comer, strips away the mythology and brings us back to human basics. The Midwestern motorcycle club at the heart of the story, the Vandals, feels authentically rugged (at times you’ll swear you can almost smell these guys), a band of brothers searching for something beyond small, working-class comforts. “They’re Americans, but they don’t really buy the American story,” photographer and writer Danny Lyon tells Rolling Stone.
This credibility isn’t all down to the top-notch ensemble and well-worn leather jackets: Nichols drew on pictures and interviews from Lyon’s 1968 book of the same name when writing The Bikeriders, building a fictional narrative around real stories Lyon recorded when embedded with the Chicago chapter of the Outlaws in that decade. As related in his new memoir This Is My Life I’m Talking About, Lyon even became a full-fledged member of the club himself — against the advice of one Hunter S. Thompson — and his documentation provides an indelible portrait of their counterculture.
Here, Nichols and Lyon talk about translating that work to the screen, why we’ll always be drawn to the open road, and why it took Nichols 20 years to make this film after first discovering Lyon’s photos.
Warning: Spoilers below.
Jeff, Danny, how’s it going?
Nichols: Very good. I’m in Berlin doing press, but I just woke up from a nap, and I’m actually feeling kind of like a human being.
Lyon: Which is what The Bikeriders is about. It’s about human beings, and that’s why it takes place in the Sixties and not in the present. I think it’s going to speak to young people about what’s possible in life and what’s been lost.
This movie was based on Danny’s documentation of biker culture, but the story is fictional. I wanted to ask how you drew on these photos to create the story we saw on the screen.
Nichols: One reason it took me so long to to write is because I really had to figure out the balance of of what to fictionalize. It’s a really strange hybrid, because so much of what Danny recorded, so much of his book, is in the film. You know, I would probably say 70 percent of the dialogue is built out of the recordings that he did in in the Sixties. But I also remember having conversations with Danny about fictionalizing the club itself and the importance of that. The Outlaws still exist, and I really didn’t want to step on their toes. Also, I didn’t want to be beholden to the history of their club. The thing that really interested me was [Danny’s] incredible portrait of people. The photographs, of course, but when you combine it with these interviews, you get really this complicated, complete picture of of these people.
Danny, did the characters we ultimately ended up with feel like reflections of the people you met in the Sixties?
Lyon: Oh, they were much more. You know, reflections — that’s what Plato talks about. They’re them. You know, it’s really astounding, I did this work over 60 years ago, and I was, like, 25 years old, it was my baby. God, I spent so long doing it. I cared about photography, but I couldn’t get it published as photographs — I was told by a really great editor that I needed a text. And just like the camera was a machine, I thought, why not use a machine to write it? And that was a tape recorder, which is another machine, and no one had done this. This is hard to believe, but only one other book had ever been published using audio tapes, and they got the Pulitzer Prize — The Children of Sanchez [a 1961 book documenting a family living in the slums of Mexico City].
So I got a machine and and I started sitting down to talk to people and just recording them. At that point, it came down not to what they looked like, but how eloquent they were. It turned out the most eloquent person in the club was a woman who wasn’t in the club. It was Kathy, who had hooked up with with Benny. [Characters with the same names are respectively portrayed by Comer and Butler in the film.] And of course, that’s how the film begins. She was a very eloquent person, and the other was Cal [played by Boyd Holbrook in the film] who was a Hells Angel. My generation were the potheads. He was from California, he was a pothead, so that was a bond. And we became very close. He would come to my house and tell his stories, and whether they were true or not, they were great stories. Seventy percent, that’s a lot, but the great thing to me is that when the actors were able to listen to the audio. In fact, Boyd Holbrook calls me up and says, “I’m from Kentucky,” and I’m going, uh-oh. Then he changes his voice, and he does this soliloquy. It sounds exactly like Cal. He’s a brilliant actor, and all of them do that. It’s mind-boggling.
Nichols: If 70 percent of the dialogue is based off of these interviews, maybe 30 percent of the plot is based off of them. Because if you said that the things that happened in this movie are based solely on these people’s lives, that would be an incomplete statement as well, because I made up this love triangle between Johnny, Benny, and Kathy. I took a lot of liberties, making amalgams of characters and other things. So much of Danny’s book is in there. But at the same time, if someone were to walk up to me and say, “Is this a true portrait of of these exact people?” that wouldn’t be right either.
Something effective about the film is that you might go in expecting a glamorization of this culture — cool clothes, attractive actors — but instead it really has the flavor of a tragedy. What do you both think about balancing those contradictory elements?
Lyons: Tragedy, uh-huh. Are we talking Aristotle or Shakespeare?
Nichols: I think there’s a better word than “glamorizing.” Danny and I, we’ve spoken about this, but you might talk about romanticizing. And I feel like there’s a bit of a difference. We’ve talked about how romantic the pictures are. They’re really beautiful. These people are beautiful. And again, Danny talked about them that way, their youth and and their style and and everything else, but when you combine it with these interviews, the whole thing gets more complex. And I think that’s where the balance comes in.
Lyon: It’s great this film got made. I’m 82 years old, so I’m glad I’m alive to see it. I think people will take from it what they want to take from it. That’s what any good work of art is about. In the photography, you can feel anything you want. You can look at these people and say, “They’re scum,” or you can look at them and say, “Oh, they’re wonderful.” I had come out of the Civil Rights movement, very young, and I was really looking for a subject to establish myself as a photographer, to show how good I was at this. You need a subject. Photography is about surfaces, it’s what you see. And these guys look great. That was a big part of it, but a big part of it was a kind of class thing.
I went to University of Chicago, Bernie Sanders was one of my classmates. I came from an intellectual background. My father was a doctor. These were blue-collar people, people looked down on them. They didn’t exist the media. I wanted to show their humanity, and I wanted to show the importance, and I always wanted to show that these people are as good as you, or they’re actually better than you. Cal, Zipco [played by Michael Shannon], Kathy, they’re amazing people, but on the radar, they’re nobody. They’re worse than nobody. And when Cockroach [played by Emory Cohen] talks about eating insects, he’s giving a finger to American society. America was at war with Vietnam, which absolutely horrified me. That’s the tax dollars and the establishment. These guys weren’t into that. They didn’t care anything about politics. They were into being free. And the way they expressed themselves was to get on a chopper and go down the street. Once in a while they got killed by a car. I loved them. I loved it. I loved riding my motorcycle.
You’re also a character in this film [played by Mike Faist], the observer moving around the edges. What did you think of the choice to portray you, the documentarian in this world?
Lyon: [Laughs.] Well, I don’t know here, Jeff… what do you think I can say?
Nichols: You can say it! He doesn’t like the way I portrayed him, because I didn’t make him radical enough or dirty enough. And that’s a completely fair thing to say.
Lyon: Let’s start with the dirt. There’s a funeral that I photographed. I went to Detroit on my motorcycle, I go to this funeral, and there’s a picture [I took] of a coffin. Did you have his funeral in the film, Jeff?
Nichols: We didn’t walk a coffin past, but we kind of replicated it with with Brucie’s funeral.
Lyon: He hits a car. That’s what Cal says, which is very prophetic. Cal makes this great speech about riding motorcycles and being alive. And his final line is, “It’s the one that comes out of nowhere that gets you,” which is true, sad to say, but it shows the existentialism of our existence. And so I go to this funeral, and in the afternoon, I’m sitting at a bar with two of the women, and they’re good-looking women, they’re dressed up in the leather, in the outfits. One of them says to the other — she’s talking about me — “Danny’s pretty cute, if he would only wash his hair.” So anyway, that’s the dirt.
Plus, I rode a motorcycle, which I don’t do in the film, and I was a member of the club. I wore the colors and went to all the meetings and drank the beer, which is problematic because I was kind of a proto-hippie or a post-punk or whatever. But yeah, I’ve been influenced by the beatniks. I met with Mike. I showed him how to use a Nikon. You know, he uses the right cameras. He uses the analog tape recorder. I got a small German machine, weighed three or four pounds. I could put it on the back of my Triumph. I could wear it. And he’s using the right machine. What he did is probably harder than what I did. I only had to do what I did once. These guys have to do it over and over.
We talked a little about this relationship you had with Kathy as the eloquent voice, an outsider among this band of outsiders. What was particularly valuable about framing this movie through her perspective?
Nichols: The first part of that answer is she’s just the most interesting. Her stories are the best. Quite selfishly, as a filmmaker and a storyteller, those are the ones you’re you’re immediately drawn to, the whole opening 20 minutes of her talking about walking into the bar and meeting the club. I mean, that stuff’s almost verbatim, her actual words. But if you step back from it, if you think about this movie just from the male point of view, it gets really heavy, and maybe it gets a little disingenuous, because Kathy was, by far, I think, the most insightful one, introspective even. It feels like, as she’s talking, she’s trying to figure out her place in the world she finds herself in, which is one reason I think we all like her so much. It’s very disarming. But if what we’re partly saying is that some of these men have trouble expressing themselves, they’re posturing — if you put the whole movie in their words, I don’t know if you get to the heart of it as clearly as you do with with Kathy. She’s just really the best one to help us interpret some of this stuff.
Lyon: You know, it’s a pity she didn’t live to see the film. She was a remarkable person. In terms of words and literature — we talked about tragedy, here’s an uneducated person, the mother of three children, who basically leaves her husband and her middle-class life to hook up with a kind of borderline lunatic, a handsome 19-year-old. Talk about drama! He’s this incredibly good-looking biker, but what’s he known for? He’s known for like, going through a schoolyard at 60 miles an hour on a motorcycle, and the police chasing him, just this craziness.
How did you originally hook up with the Outlaws?
Lyon: I had a motorcycle, and I would go to South Side Chicago. There were two motorcycle shops, one in Gary, Indiana, one in South Chicago. This guy Jack was working on my bike, and I said, “Do you know any clubs I can photograph?” He says, “Yeah, I’m a member of the Chicago Outlaws, why don’t you come to the meeting?” Friday, I go over to the meeting, across the street was a real Chicago diner with stools and a checkerboard floor — chili was 35 cents, coffee was a nickel — and I go inside. Jack was there, I took a picture of him, because he had his uni on, and Kathy was sitting there, and she was so welcoming. Of course, I’m a fish out of water here. This is like going to Mars. I’m playing a role. I’m actually a journalist in my head, but I’m not talking about any of this stuff. I’m a biker, and and she was so welcoming. That was the beginning. People want me to take their picture, they’re drinking beer and they’re posing. One of them turned to me says, “Why don’t you join the club?” This light bulb goes off.
I had been in contact with Hunter Thompson. We had a mutual friend, we wrote each other postcards and letters. I wrote him and said, “I’ve been photographing bikers, and I was going to join the club.” And he writes this long letter and says, “Don’t join the club.” He said, “I don’t know what your guys are like, but these Hells Angels” — who he was reporting on — he talked about how dangerous they were, and he said terrible things about the Hells Angels. And I write back, saying, “Oh, our guys say the Hells Angels are candy-ass.” What do I know? I’ve never even met a Hells Angel. He urges me, whatever I do, don’t join the club. And then he says at the end, make sure I wear my helmet when I ride my motorcycle, which is really bourgeois shit, and ironically, it’s not me, but Hunter Thompson is beaten up by the Hells Angels. I get along with [my] guys fine. They liked what I did, and they liked the book. You know, they all were alive to see it. I have a picture of Cal reading a book in Canada someone took and sent to me.
Right, I remember Hunter getting stomped at the end of his book.
Lyon: Well, it shows he had a bad relationship with his subjects. Seriously. I only work with people that I like, often that I love, and I only work where I’m welcome. I don’t feel comfortable otherwise. Anyway, it was Kathy who really welcomed me at the beginning, and at the end, I realized she’s more interesting than all these other people. I fly back from New York to photograph her, because at that point, I’m finishing the book and editing it, and I take pictures all over her house.
So you avoided getting your ass kicked. But the violence we see in the movie — it doesn’t shy away from that impulse that they have. Was it pure machismo for these guys, or do they find something liberating about brawling?
Nichols: We talked once, Danny, and you said, you just made up them burning down the bar. Which is true, they never burned down a bar.
Lyon: They did do it later, probably. [Laughs.] But they didn’t do it when I was there.
Nichols: In one of the interviews that Kathy gives, she talks about how Benny was at this bar and got beaten up by a couple of locals — they didn’t like that he was wearing his colors, and he wouldn’t take his colors off. And Johnny, they talked about burning a bar down. So that’s a good example of me taking something that’s mentioned in the book, but only as an idea, and I turned it into an actual scene that affected this character. It’s actually a really pivotal scene.
Lyon: I have a scene in the book where they have the last-ever New Year’s. It’s in Milwaukee, and the Milwaukee guys were, like, tougher and meaner than my guys. It was just their rep. Zipco was a Milwaukee Outlaw. Anyway, they had a New Year’s party at the Seaway diner. Apparently, the building was going to be demolished. It was in some zone, and there was this urban renewal. And I remember there was a discussion that they were going to have this party and then they were going to burn the building down, which I’m sure they didn’t do. It was kind of hyperbole.
Nichols: Kathy also talks about Benny throwing a punch at a guy, and the guy moving, and his hand going through a window. He gets glass up in his hand. But he just kept fighting.
Lyon: That’s what Marlon Brando does [in a scene of On the Waterfront]. He punches the window. Have you ever done that, Jeff?
Nichols: No, thank god.
Danny: I have. I punched a window out once. And I think I might have done it because of seeing On the Waterfront when I was 14, but I was I was very upset.
The expectations of normal society seems to really weigh heavily on these characters — this crushing sense that they don’t belong.
Lyon: That’s how I feel! Seriously, who wants to belong to society? I mean, what is going on? It’s 50 years later. I mean, look at the world that has been created for us.
Nichols: Danny, I think you’re a true radical. What I found interesting about some of these guys is they would talk about what they didn’t like about mainstream society, and they were really good at it. In fact, some interviews that that I listened to from the recording, I didn’t actually put in the movie. There’s this one guy — I don’t know who exactly, it was in the club, so there were a lot of voices around — but he was talking about not wanting to own a house, not wanting to own a car. What I find interesting is they’ll talk about not wanting to be part of society, but then, if you take the end of Zipco’s speech about the draft board, he’s pissed off that he couldn’t go to Vietnam. He’s pissed off that he wasn’t accepted. It’s interesting that they didn’t want to be a part of it, but at the same time, some of them, were offended that they weren’t accepted.
Lyon: That’s one of the really brilliant speeches in the book and in the film. And Michael Shannon, he is Zipco. I mean, he smells like Zipco. You can just tell. These people are talking to this young boy, who is me, and that’s why they reveal themselves. They’re responding to me, and I love these guys. Zipco makes an absolutely amazing speech about America. You’re right, he wants to go in Vietnam. He’s a total fuck-up. He’s so drunk the night before that he can barely talk. The next morning he shows up — this is a guy who has vomit in his beard because he’s always drinking wine. Talk about a Shakespearean character. Zipco is unbelievably funny, and he knows it. He looks a role, and he lives a role. And he actually ended up in Florida. I don’t think he was drunk, but apparently he was walking across the street in broad daylight and was hit by a car and killed.
Nichols: This is why I work with Michael Shannon, because he’s smarter than I am. I placed that speech into the into the script, and it is funny. And right before we shoot that, Mike walks up to me — we don’t rehearse, Mike and I actually don’t talk a lot, because he’s so damn smart, you don’t really talk about anything.
Lyon: He’s like Zipco.
Nichols: He comes up to me before we film it, and he says, “You think this speech is pretty funny, don’t you?” I was like, “Well, I do think it’s kind of funny, Mike. The character gets drunk, your mom pulls you out of bed, and then you take this test and curse everybody out.” And he goes, “Yeah, I don’t think it’s funny at all.”
Lyon: I don’t think Zipco thought it was funny!
Nichols: By the end, he doesn’t, because he’s talking about crying. And so Mike delivers this monologue, and I’ve got all these other actors sitting around, kind of captive by this campfire, and they’re, yes, listening to Zipco and listening to the words, but they’re also watching Michael Shannon act, and he gets them all laughing, and then he pulls the rug out from under them [with] the way he delivers the end of that speech. There’s Mike Shannon taking this monologue that a different person maybe would have delivered differently, and he’s kind of giving the psychology to the whole group just sitting there. That was in our first week of filming, and that speech keeps coming up. The other actors keep bringing that up, in part because of the speech, and in part because of Michael Shannon’s performance.
Lyon: And how about this line? “If you don’t work with your hands, you’re no fuckin’ good.”
Nichols: That’s one of my favorite lines in the whole movie.
Lyon: Look at us right now. Anybody using their hands? I got two pieces of plastic stuck in my ear. I’m sitting 30 feet away from my computer screen. I mean, I’m writing a novel. I’m using one finger on a little screen that’s like three inches high. Zipco knew all this 60 years ago. That’s why they were dirty and rode bikes. And look at Cal and talking about chopped scooters. That’s an amazing speech about individuality. Then he says, “He got his out of a box.” Yeah, Apple is great. The Apple boxes are beautiful, aren’t they? Everything comes in a beautiful box now.
The biker’s been such an enduring archetype over the decades. In all the mythology, what do people still get wrong about them?
Lyon: The bikers today are not the people in this film, and they’re not the people who I rode with, and they’re not me. They’re a whole different animal. And those motorcycles come out of the box, by the way.
Nichols: That’s kind of the point of the whole movie. You’re watching an inflection point in time where the attitude that attracted these guys originally to start this club is different than the attitude that attracted later guys to join it. What the movie’s trying to do is show that there was a there was a thing that happened in the 1960s that shifted, that it’s no longer a social club for working-class guys who are looking for something outside of the mainstream. There’s a violence to it. There’s a there’s a purpose to it, later, for these clubs, that wasn’t formed yet at the start. What I get out of the end of the film is a sense of nostalgia. This feeling that this time and these people, they they don’t exist anymore. They can’t exist anymore.
Lyon: Well, we still have rebels in America. You know, they asked me that — we did [an interview] in London, remember? And they asked me, “Who’s the rebels?” And I mentioned the Lakota Indians stopping a pipeline. People didn’t like that.
Nichols: It goes back to Danny’s whole approach to his career and his subjects. There are always going to be people out there that we look down on for a myriad of reasons. Usually it’s class, like Danny said, but they might be scary, and they might actually have thoughts and behaviors that shock us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t worth talking to.
Lyon: That’s what Dostoevsky said.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
