On tour for Jeff Nichols' new drama The cyclists, hosted at The Bike Shed in Los Angeles, I get to ride on the back of a Harley through the streets of downtown Los Angeles and across the Sixth Street Bridge. With a professional driver doing all the work, I can enjoy the air hitting my face, the way we can easily move through traffic, without the weight of a car. It feels like… freedom.
“I'm sure every article about motorcycles in the history of the world contains the word freedom, but it's true,” Norman Reedus tells me, the day after my trip. “It's like you're in your own little world and you're flying through the sky, and you can feel it.”
But for Tom Hardy, the question of whether motorcycles mean freedom is not so easy to answer. “I think anything that allows you to choose gives you a certain element of freedom,” he says. “So, motorcycles mean freedom? I think they are symbolic in some aspect of that. But they are also a responsibility and there is a clear lack of freedom. [in being] responsible. “You have to be extremely responsible with a vehicle like a motorcycle, especially if you want to live.”
That dichotomy between the freedom of motorcycles and their real dangers is a big part of The cycliststhat Nichols was inspired to write and direct after encountering the book of the same name. In the photographs of Danny Lyon and in interviews with members of the motorcycle gangs of the 1960s, Nichols found “a complete portrait of this subculture. And so, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, he gave me everything I needed to show the breadth of human beings involved in this very particular outgroup.”
The cyclists begins in the 1960s, when a group of motorcycle enthusiasts, led by Johnny (Hardy), form Vandals MC, a group that initially begins as a way for men to find a sense of community, before more forces dark things transform the gang into just another gang. Violent operation. Trapped within the Vandals are youngest member Benny (Austin Butler) and his wife Kathy (Jodie Comer), whose relationship is complicated by Johnny's control over Benny and Benny's own passion for horseback riding.
“All my films have had to do with masculinity, usually father-son relationships, because that's what I'm into. But this movie seemed to address it on a broader spectrum, definitely a more American spectrum, the idea of masculinity in all its prose and all its drawbacks,” Nichols says.
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