116 min | R | June 21, 2024 | Focus Features
Jeff Nichols makes a motorcycle club movie that is really about the death of American rebellion. Austin Butler broods. Tom Hardy mumbles. Jodie Comer steals the whole thing.
The Vandals are a Midwestern motorcycle club in the 1960s. Johnny is the president. Benny is the quiet, magnetic member everyone gravitates toward. Kathy is Benny’s wife who watches the club evolve from a group of guys who like riding into something violent and criminal. The film is inspired by Danny Lyon’s 1963 photo book about the Chicago Outlaws. Jeff Nichols uses Lyon’s interview-style framing device to tell the story through Kathy’s retrospective narration. She saw everything. She understood it before the men did.
Jodie Comer plays Kathy with a Chicago accent and a directness that commands every scene. She is the film’s narrator and its moral center and its best performance. Comer makes Kathy funny and frustrated and fiercely intelligent. Austin Butler plays Benny with the same smoldering silence he brought to Elvis, applied to a man who communicates through presence rather than speech. Tom Hardy plays Johnny with a Brando-channeling intensity that sits right on the edge of parody. He is a man who started a club because he saw The Wild One and does not know what to do now that the club has outgrown his vision.
Nichols directed Mud and Midnight Special and Take Shelter. He understands masculinity and community and the way both can curdle. The film is shot with warm period photography that makes the 1960s Midwest feel both nostalgic and menacing. The riding sequences are beautiful. The violence when it comes is sudden and unglamorous. The interview framing device gives the film a documentary texture that grounds the mythology.
The film is about what happens when a subculture becomes an institution. The Vandals start as freedom. They become obligation. Then they become a criminal enterprise. Johnny cannot stop what he started. Benny does not care enough to try. Kathy sees it all and cannot save anyone. Nichols tells this story with the specificity and restraint that makes his best work feel inevitable.