Jodie’s bike epic is The Godfather on wheels
The Bikeriders (15, 116 mins) Verdict: Wheelie wheelie good ★★★★☆ Federer: Twelve Final Days (12A, 88 mins)
Verdict: Swiss love, Swiss love ★★☆☆☆
AS HARD as it might be, try to picture The Godfather as the story of a motorbike gang: a fraternity of tough guys more than willing to break society’s codes of behaviour, yet hidebound by their own. That, in essence, is The Bikeriders, a compelling drama that doesn’t hide its debt to great mob pictures, but is tremendously engaging in its own right (and boasts a glorious 1960s soundtrack).
It even has a GoodFellas-style narrator in the form of Kathy, superbly played by Jodie Comer, whose native Liverpool accent takes a dive to the bottom of Lake Michigan. Surfacing in its place are the broad Chicago vowels of Kathy, a blue-collar girl with a weakness for a pretty face, who at a rowdy bar one night in the mid-1960s falls for the maddeningly enigmatic but impossibly handsome Benny (Austin Butler) — and marries him just five weeks later.
That, effectively, means marrying into the Vandals, whose chainsmoking founder and de facto godfather is Johnny (Tom Hardy), a husband and father himself even though the only family that seems to matter to him comprises oily blokes in denim and leathers. They include Zipco (Michael Shannon), Cal (Boyd Holbrook) and Brucie (Damon Herriman), but Benny is the one Johnny has earmarked as his successor. For all his macho menace, the leader of the pack is somewhat in thrall to the younger man, regarding him like a favoured son. As Kathy notes in the voiceover: ‘Johnny always wanted what Benny had, to not care about nothin’.’ Actually, Benny does care about Kathy, in his laconic way, but not enough to give up riding with the Vandals, even when she begs him to, even when he has his foot broken by a couple of goons in a bar who take offence at his jacket with its club insignia, his socalled ‘colours’. The narrative unfolds episodically, linked by the stories Kathy tells to a journalist (Mike Faist), who chronicles life with the Vandals from 1965 to 1973. The film’s writerdirector, Jeff Nichols, got the idea from a similar exercise by photojournalist Danny Lyon, from which he has woven an entirely credible sub-culture, populated by characters who, as one of them says, ‘don’t belong nowhere else so they belong together’.
Whether it’s just in Nichols’ fictional account, or based on fact, Johnny decided to form the Vandals while watching Marlon Brando on TV, in The Wild One.
Either way, it rings true. But every now and then (again, in further homage to those mighty mob movies), someone questions his right to be boss.
‘Fists or knives,’ he says wearily, to each leadership challenge.
HARDY, too, gives a wonderful performance, so two of the three leads are British, in a film so comprehensively American. Mind you, there’s a universality about its theme of belonging, and there are truths for us all in Johnny’s ineloquent philosophising.
‘You can give everything you got to a thing, and it’s still just gunna do what it’s gunna do,’ he grunts.
■ ALTERNATIVELY, you can give everything you’ve got to a thing, and make it answer to your will and your genius. Which brings us to Federer: Twelve Final Days, Asif Kapadia’s latest documentary, following his dazzling films about Ayrton Senna, Amy Winehouse and Diego Maradona.
Critically speaking, that short list tells you everything you need to know about Kapadia’s film (co-directed by Joe Sabia), which follows the great Roger Federer (left) from the announcement of his retirement in 2022 to his valedictory tennis tournament at the O2 Arena less than a fortnight later.
His previous subjects were all tormented or tragic or both, whereas the Swiss maestro is well-adjusted, with a family (supportive parents, lovely wife, two sets of twins) that seems like a kiss from the gods.
All of that burnishes the Federer legend, and personally I yield to nobody in my admiration of him as a sportsman: sitting on Centre Court watching him win Wimbledon will always be one of the privileges of my former life as a sports writer.
But it makes him an insipid choice for a behind-the-scenes documentary that is really just an 88-minute rhapsody... enjoyable enough, if you revere the lachrymose tennis icon (who, spoiler alert, did a fair bit of sobbing in those 12 days), but still too adoring by half.
■ THE BIKERIDERS is in cinemas now. Federer: Twelve Final Days is on Prime Video.