MOVIE NEWS – The third trailer for Motorcycles is out, and it convinces you that it was worth waiting so long for this movie. It was already presented to a select few last year, but the Hollywood strikes intervened, so now the presentation has been postponed to the summer. RottenTomatoes gave it 83 percent, which may be why.

Author filmmaker Jeff Nichols, screenwriter-director, tells the story of a sixties biker gang about America in transition, rebellion and the desire for freedom, but most of all about how the pushing of boundaries turns into lawless violence, and how this subculture becomes a hotbed for organized crime. . It emerges from the film that the attention of the law enforcement agencies was very quickly directed to the motorcycle gangs because their way of life was financed by drug trafficking, robbery, extortion and money laundering, and bloody clashes between the various rival gangs were frequent.

For Nichols, a brilliant book of photo essays, Danny Lyon’s The Bikeriders, published in 1968, was a source of inspiration. Lyon himself was a member of a motorcycle gang, the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club, essentially capturing his own life in his photographs. Later, he reported on the hellish world of Texas prisons with equally shocking power (Conversations with The Dead, 1971).

The biker gang introduced by the director is called the Vandals, but the story broadly follows the history of outlaws in Chicago. He didn’t have to dig through the dusty files of archives, as the leader of the Chicago Outlaws, Peter James (to his fans, just Big Pete) wrote his life story under the title The Last Chicago Boss: My Life with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club. However, Nichols took the artistic freedom to create his own characters and unique stories for them – he did not rush, the idea for the film began to take shape more than twenty years ago.

However, the director stuck to Lyon’s attitude, which he still believes to be the right approach: “He knew exactly what kind of wood they were carved from, because he was one of them. He often said of them how beautiful they were. Other times, however, he argued and called them damn idiots. There was tension in him because he was nightmarishly seduced by this subculture, but at the same time he was aware of the terrible reality,” Nichols summarized to Deadline back in September.

The Bikeriders stars Oscar nominee Austin Butler (Elvis), Oscar nominee Tom Hardy (The Returner) and Emmy Award winner Jodie Comer (Battle of the Obsessed).

(The Bikeriders – domestic premiere: June 20, 2024)

Source: UIP