The Bikeriders review: Motorcycle throwback is a mesmerising mix of machismo and emotions

It deserves the full theatrical treatment, and it deserves an audience who will appreciate the work that went into it.

The Goodfellas comparisons are inevitable, and Nichols – an accomplished American filmmaker, among the cleverest in contemporary cinema – knows exactly what he’s doing with that awesome freeze-frame opening.

Why bother pointing out the similarities between ­Scorsese’s seminal gangster epic and ­Nichols’s riveting outlaw biker feature when the man in charge has already done it for us?

That isn’t to say Nichols is a copycat.

The man behind Mud, Midnight Special and the Oscar-nominated Loving is a terrific storyteller, impossible to pigeon-hole, and he spent years trying to bring Danny Lyon’s 1967 photography book The Bikeriders to the big screen.

Michael Shannon, the director’s most consistent collaborator, told him he would never get around to making it. Perhaps that’s just Shannon’s way of motivating a friend. Whatever the case, ­Nichols has proven him wrong.

Armed with a factual blueprint (Lyon’s book depicts the real-life Outlaws MC from McCook, ­Illinois) and a fictional story (the film’s central gang call themselves The Vandals), The Bikeriders begins and ends with a man named Benny (Austin Butler).

We don’t know much about this handsome biker, but we do know this: he’s the smoothest operator in any room; a strong, silent type who only ever comes out of his shell to join a fight.

Johnny (Tom Hardy), The Vandals’s committed president, adores the kid. So, too, does Kathy (Jodie Comer) who, on a chilly evening in 1960s Chicago, wanders into a random biker bar with a message for a friend, and leaves with a future husband.

She and Benny are inseparable. Kathy knows nothing about bikes, but she tolerates the madness and the mayhem. She worries about Johnny, about his methods and about what happens when The Vandals get too big for their boots.​

The club started out as a space for like-minded oddballs and outcasts to share their love of motorcycles – to ride together, drink together and to shoot some pool and swap some stories about their best and worst days.

Johnny, a Marlon Brando fan, kicked it all off after watching The Wild One. But as the years progress and the membership expands, The Vandals begin to shed their innocence. Johnny, too, loses his head, and it’s after Benny is beaten by a couple of rival bikers across town that the boss decides to cause some trouble.

Kathy knows exactly where this will end for her husband if he doesn’t get out. She also knew what she was getting herself into when she married Benny – and he begs her not to make him choose. Things get messy.

Lyon’s book allowed its pictures to tell an epic tale of masculinity and motorcycle culture in 1960s America. In a way, that’s how Nichols’ film occasionally operates. The Bikeriders adopts a rich, novelistic tone – light on plot, perhaps, yet consistently thrilling. Part of that is down to the imagery. It’s a fabulous looking film – handsomely designed and impeccably performed.

True, it sometimes feels as though there are chunks missing from the story, but that’s intentional. We’re not meant to see what Benny did when he wasn’t hanging with Kathy and his biker buds, or how Johnny behaved around his wife and kids at home.

The clue is in the title, and The Bikeriders does what it’s supposed to. Nichols also toys with an unusual framing device. Here, he has created his own version of Lyon (nicely portrayed by Mike Faist) who interviews Kathy (our spirited narrator) and the others about their lives together.

It sounds heavy-handed, but it works. The film is probably at its best when it allows its story to breathe, and when the boys – including Michael Shannon’s Zipco, Emory Cohen’s Cockroach and Boyd Holbrook’s Cal – bare their souls to one another.

It takes a special kind of chap to join a gang like The Vandals. Most of them have a story to tell, and there are plenty of angry confessions in the mix. The engine noise will stay with you – so, too, will the heartache behind it.

Mesmerising stuff.

Four stars