Believe it or not, Jeff Nichols is tired of critics comparing his latest movie to Goodfellas. There are surface similarities between the Austin-based filmmaker’s sixth feature, The Bikeriders, and the Martin Scorsese Mafia epic that regularly places high on lists of the greatest films ever made. Both movies are sprawling character studies whose stories span years. The films both indicate the passage of time through era-specific music cues, use voice-over narration and freeze-frames, and ultimately accomplish the trick of glamorizing—then exposing the dark underside of—a subculture that’s long been romanticized in the popular consciousness. Nichols’s film spent the latter half of 2023 on the film-festival circuit, building buzz for its eventual wide release on June 21. At those festival screenings, critics largely took to the movie, but the Scorsese comparisons still turn Nichols off.
The Bikeriders is an adaptation of a 1968 book by photojournalist Danny Lyon that documents the four years Lyon spent following the motorcycle club the Chicago Outlaws, which is still active today. (Outlaw motorcycle groups don’t tend to approve of outsiders using their names and logos, so in the film, the name is changed to the fictional Vandals MC.) The book doesn’t contain a narrative; it’s a primary source, a collection of photos and interview transcripts. In the film, actor Mike Faist plays Lyon, and the conversations he has with his subjects—primarily Kathy (Jodie Comer), a woman who lands in the club’s world when she falls for the young wild card Benny (Austin Butler)—are often verbatim excerpts from the original interviews. If, while watching the film, you think Comer’s nasally Midwestern accent is a bit much, rest assured that the Liverpudlian is doing an authentic impression of the real Kathy, whose original interview tapes Comer studied. It’s a memoir, told largely from Kathy’s perspective, but it’s mostly about Benny and his relationship with the club’s paternal founder, Johnny (Tom Hardy), and the evolution of the organization from, as Nichols puts it, “social club to biker gang to big biker gang to violent big biker gang.” And if the critics who made the Goodfellas comparisons had focused on the narrative Nichols created out of Lyon’s raw material, that wouldn’t bother him so much.
“The movie is structured in such an odd way,” he tells me over breakfast tacos at Mi Madre’s, in Austin, where every server treats him like an old friend. He used to live around the corner from the East Austin institution and has been a regular for years; he picked the place when I asked him to meet somewhere that felt like part of his Austin. The staff members are used to hearing him talk about movies, so they don’t bat an eye when we spend three hours at a table talking narrative, story structure, and The Bikeriders. “Some people like it more than others. Some people don’t like it at all. But I like it. And when I look at it, I’m like, ‘Man, why doesn’t everybody notice how hard this is to do?’ And they’re like, ‘Eh, it feels kind of like Goodfellas.’ They just grab the low-hanging fruit, like, ‘There are freeze-frames and music!’ Yeah, okay, I get it.”
At this point in his career, simply being appreciated may have lost its luster. Nichols wants his movie to be understood the way he understands it. The Bikeriders enjoys an 86 percent “fresh” rating on the reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, an impressively high number—but it’s among the lowest of Nichols’s career, which has yet to include a movie that isn’t widely praised. He’s entitled to be particular about Scorsese comparisons because he was hired to direct 2016’s Loving, about the couple whose Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case legalized interracial marriage nationwide, on Scorsese’s recommendation to the film’s producers. In Nichols’s telling, the famed filmmaker was brought a list of potential directors and insisted he didn’t need to see it. “It’s got to be Jeff Nichols,” Scorsese said, according to Nichols. “He’s the best Southern filmmaker going.”
Nichols is nineteen years and six films into his career; he’s written everything he’s directed, and the list of actors he’s worked with includes Jessica Chastain, Adam Driver, Kirsten Dunst, Matthew McConaughey, Ruth Negga, Michael Shannon, Sam Shepard, and Reese Witherspoon, who, along with Butler and Hardy, have fifteen Oscar nominations among them. He’s aware that The Bikeriders, which will be the widest release of his career, uses music cues to indicate the passage of time and includes some freeze-frame shots—but he’d like to talk about the story.
Here’s a good one: the son of a furniture salesman from Little Rock, Arkansas, goes to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, in Winston-Salem. During his time attending the small public school 2,245 miles from Los Angeles, he meets other students who are all destined for big things in Hollywood: directors David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, the three most recent Halloween movies), Jody Hill (Vice Principals, The Righteous Gemstones), and Craig Zobel (Mare of Easttown; Max’s forthcoming Batman spin-off, The Penguin); actor Danny McBride (most of the aforementioned projects); and cinematographers Tim Orr (Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, Strays) and Adam Stone (Waco: American Apocalypse, Wild Wild Country).
Green was the first of the cohort to break through, directing the 2000 indie hit George Washington right out of film school, to wide acclaim, in the waning days of the nineties indie film boom. It cost $42,000 to make. His example—and his generous guidance—paved the way for Nichols. “I owe so much to him,” he says. “None of this happens without David.”
Green’s success with George Washington gave Nichols the push he needed to direct his first feature. After college, he’d written a script inspired by the Steve Earle song “Down the Road,” which he describes as “very much a ‘Good Man Is Hard to Find,’ Flannery O’Connor thing” that he struggled to get anyone interested in. He’d seen friends move to New York and Los Angeles, where, he says, “they would work at agencies, they would work in studios, and they would read scripts and they wouldn’t make movies.”
Nervous about falling into that rut but needing a change of scenery after a year back home in Arkansas, he moved to Austin, where his brother was attending law school, around 2002. Through friends of friends, he met a group of filmmakers that included the documentarian Margaret Brown, and he worked as production manager on her Townes Van Zandt documentary Be Here to Love Me. He learned how to make a production budget and develop film through that experience, and at its conclusion, he returned to Arkansas to save money so he could write and direct what would become his first feature, 2007’s Shotgun Stories. (He was living in Austin again by the time the film came out.) His parents agreed to help him buy a camera and a laptop he could use for the project if he also used them to shoot and edit commercials for their furniture store. He wrote a letter to Michael Shannon, who at that point was mostly known for supporting roles in 8 Mile and Kangaroo Jack, asking him to read the script. “I thought it was one of the best scripts I ever read,” Shannon told me. “I still do.”
Back in those days, the technology to project a digital copy of a film at a high enough resolution to show at a festival was still in its infancy, so after finishing the movie, Nichols needed money for a film print, which could cost as much as $150,000. He reached out to Green, who told him to “treat it like Star Wars” and not show the film to anyone else; Green agreed to sign on as a producer and send a single DVD copy to a film financier named Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, who loved it. Nichols got the film print, got into festivals, and made Roger Ebert’s list of the best films of 2008 (the film’s U.S. release year). He followed Shotgun Stories up in 2011 with the Sundance hit Take Shelter, which Shannon also starred in and which Kavanaugh-Jones helped produce. The following year, he helped jump-start the McConaissance by casting Uvalde’s favorite son as the title character in the coming-of-age drama Mud, then returned in 2016 with two movies—the Spielbergian sci-fi thriller Midnight Special and Loving (both of which, like Mud, also featured Shannon, whom Nichols describes as his “soulmate”). Then things hit the skids.
Loving was a modestly budgeted drama that made a little bit of money for a distributor that didn’t expect it to earn a fortune; Midnight Special was a more expensive genre movie for Warner Bros. that bombed at the box office. Nichols is proud of the movie, on which he had control of the final cut, but he’s still sore about the studio politics around its release. The executive who’d green-lit the project was fired shortly before, and his replacement was unenthused about the movie. “I got final cut, and then they were like, ‘But guess what, kid, we’re going to release it on [five] screens!’ Well, that’s not a secret to success,” he recalls. “It was literally kind of a—it wasn’t a f— you to me, but it was a f— you to the film. They were just like, ‘We don’t think this will go the distance, so we’re not going to release it.’ ” After its initial five-screen run in L.A. and New York, it maxed out at only about five hundred screens, a fraction of the theaters that’ll get The Bikeriders. “It was a conscious choice,” Nichols says. “I think he just didn’t want his previous boss to get a win.”
Nichols wasn’t quite the same hot property in Hollywood after Midnight Special, but he was still choosy about his projects. Living in Austin, far from the L.A. pressure cooker, probably helped. He had an idea for a big-budget sci-fi film set in Arkansas, but he knew that getting $100 million from a studio after his last attempt at a genre piece flopped was unlikely. Then he got an offer from 21st Century Fox to remake the 1988 James Caan–Mandy Patinkin science fiction detective film, Alien Nation.
“They called and asked, ‘Do you want to remake Alien Nation?,’ and I was like, ‘Absolutely not.’ But I called Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, and he said, ‘Couldn’t you just put that title on your idea?’ ” Nichols recalls. He told the Fox executives about the sci-fi blockbuster he wanted to make and offered to turn that into Alien Nation. “They loved it. We developed it. We had a big, big, big, big actor interested in doing it. And then Disney closed the deal to acquire Fox, looked at me, and said, ‘Why do we need this? We have Star Wars.’ And I had no argument for that.” (Nichols, a shit-talker by nature, adds, “Little did we know they were going to run that s— into the ground.”)
This is how a hotshot director with the wind at his back can go from releasing two movies in 2016 to waiting eight years for his next shot. He kept working in the meantime—in 2020, he was hired by John Krasinski to write and direct the third installment in the A Quiet Place franchise, but it didn’t stick.
“It had been five years since I made a movie and it was the middle of a pandemic. I saw a way to make something that starred Michael Shannon and was beautiful, and then you realize, ‘Oh, yeah, but it’s John Krasinski’s movie,’ ” Nichols says. “I told him at the beginning that it’s gotta become my movie. ‘Of course, of course,’ and they always say that. Then there’s a point where they’re giving notes and you’re like, ‘I’m not going to take those notes because it’s my movie,’ and they’re like, ‘No! No, it’s not!’ ” Nichols left A Quiet Place: Day One in late 2021.
When I ask him about the fact that of the projects he’s been hired to take on, the one that got made was the relatively small-scale Loving and not the big-budget Quiet Place or Alien Nation, he nods. “Nature has a way of working itself out. It’s a pretty big gun barrel you’re staring down before you go into production, or even preproduction, on a movie like that,” he says. “But I will say that my script to A Quiet Place: Day One? I stand by it. There was an end to that movie that would have brought the friggin’ house down. I don’t know if they used it or not. But I’ll tell you this: the project I’m doing right now is very much like what you’re saying, which is that I’ve been hired to adapt the last two Cormac McCarthy novels.”
That may prove difficult—those books, The Passenger and Stella Maris, are narratively difficult even by McCarthy’s standards—but Nichols seems excited by the challenge. Adam Stone, Nichols’s former classmate in North Carolina and the director of photography on every one of his movies, told me, “I’m like a quarter of the way through [the book] The Passenger, and I’m like, ‘What the f— am I reading?’ But that’s what Jeff is into.”
Even his long-dead Alien Nation project may get another chance. The Fox executive who developed the project later took a job at Paramount; she had been the person who suggested him to Krasinski for A Quiet Place and, Nichols recounts, told him, “We’ve got to get that script out of Disney.” It’s basically unheard of for a script paid for by one studio, and tied to intellectual property it owns, to jump to another studio (“I didn’t think it was possible,” Nichols told me), but the big actor is eyeing the project once more, and Nichols sounds sanguine about the whole thing. “Who knows if it’ll get made at Paramount, which is a studio that is having some issues, but they love the script,” he said. “My dream would be to make this film, but the universe will abide. If I’m not supposed to, I’m not supposed to.” Regardless, despite the flirtations with big-budget filmmaking, Nichols seems content to be where he is: “I’m so glad that The Bikeriders is my next movie, and not A Quiet Place: Day One.”
Nichols may not love the Goodfellas comparisons, but after I watched The Bikeriders at the Austin Film Festival last November, another similarity came to my mind—one that only became more pronounced after I got an email from someone who’d read a blog post I’d written about the A Quiet Place news back in 2020 and was looking to get in touch with the filmmaker. Both movies spend a lot of time romanticizing the exploits of violent, misanthropic, dangerous men.
The email concerned one of the characters in The Bikeriders, a real person named Arthur Gabriel “Cal” Dion, who’s played in the film by Boyd Holbrook. In writing the film, Nichols used pieces of the interviews Lyon conducted and gave his characters the names of the real people Lyon photographed. But much of the individual stories of the subjects—their actions that Lyon wasn’t present for, their inner lives, and anything they did outside of the years 1963 to 1967—Nichols invented. As a filmmaking exercise, it’s fascinating, giving the movie a dreamlike quality. It’s like looking at old photos and imagining the lives of the people in them.
But the characters were real people, and the email was from someone who said he was the cousin of a woman Dion married in 1958. “I recall he was a Canadian Air Force pilot stationed in San Diego,” he wrote. “They had four children together and then he joined some ridiculous biker gang in the 1960’s. [She] walked out into the garage of their home one day to find he and his roadie friends ‘making a mama,’ which was slang for initiating some woman into their biker gang. I’m sure that you may conclude exactly what that meant, as the woman was bent over the seat of a motorcycle.” His cousin, he wrote, passed away last year. “The son of a bitch from the biker gang that she was married to died in the 1980’s,” and Dion’s daughter—the letter writer’s cousin once removed—was hoping to speak to Nichols about the way her father was portrayed in the film. He concluded the letter with his phone number.
In the movie, there are two kinds of members of the motorcycle club: the early members, who are portrayed sympathetically as guys who shared a common interest and wanted to drink and ride motorcycles together, and who were looking for a place where men who felt like outsiders might fit in, and the later members, who were drawn in by the gang’s general lawlessness and organized crime. When the film depicts acts of brutal violence against women, it’s the latter group that commits them. Dion is presented as a member of the first group. I handed Nichols a copy of the letter at Mi Madre’s. He read it, then handed it back to me. I asked him how he approached putting real people who were also products of his imagination in the movie.
“You mean, how do I square that?” he said. “At some point, I just kind of took ownership of the fictional world. Rightly or wrongly—I think to do what I wanted to do, which was to make a film that gave the essence of the book, I needed to be able to fictionalize these characters. I didn’t want to make a documentary. I really didn’t.” He thought for a moment. “How can I say this without sounding . . . I don’t want to say that I didn’t care, but I’m not a huge fan of contemporary motorcycle-gang culture. I’ve never seen Sons of Anarchy. It’s just not my thing. I was way more intrigued by these guys that had jobs and families and started this thing, and it feels like a prequel to another subculture, and this is how it got started. And if I’m doing that, then I’m not really looking for the salacious details.”
In Nichols’s idea of the film, it’s more interesting if the characters are real, and human—by turns charming and terrible. He’s heard stories about some of the people the movie depicts doing vile things—nailing a woman’s hands to a tree and flying Nazi flags are two he recounts—but including those actions in the movie would have made it too easy to dismiss a culture that audiences are still incredibly drawn to. “We’re still obsessed with motorcycles. We probably always will be,” he says. There’s a point early in the film when Kathy says that she knows this is all bad for her, but she wants it anyway. “That’s not Kathy,” he says. “That’s us. I wanted to ask the question, Why? Why does Austin Butler look so good on that bike?”
It’s a valid answer, but I’m not sure I buy it. So I go back to Goodfellas. In explaining the similarity between the two movies, Nichols brought up the structure: “The first hour is a love letter to the mob and that lifestyle. It’s designed to make you fall in love with that lifestyle, even while they’re out stabbing people and doing crazy s—. You don’t get out of the first hour of that movie not being like, ‘F— yeah,’ ” he told me. “And then there’s an hour dismantling it.”
But the audience members decide for themselves how they’re going to engage with a movie, and for a lot of viewers, the romanticized part of Goodfellas lingers longer than the comeuppance. When Future raps “They treat us like the Goodfellas everywhere that we go,” he doesn’t mean that he’s seen as an average nobody who gets to live the rest of his life like a schnook out in the suburbs—he means he’s perceived to be a tough guy, a movie gangster, well-dressed, merciless, and dangerous.
“I’ve watched the first hour of that movie a lot and then walked away,” Nichols acknowledges. “You’re not wrong.” When showing The Bikeriders to test audiences, the note the studio kept getting was that they really liked the first hour. “We just had to keep telling them, like, ‘Yeah, no s—.’ ” In the end, Nichols has to make his peace with the idea that audiences might take away from The Bikeriders something other than the whole message he wants them to absorb—that this seductive and compelling subculture has a dark side to it that’s left a lot of ruined lives in its wake.
“[The book] carries a lot of curiosity and empathy, which most people say they do, but they’re scared of it. I’m scared of it,” he tells me. “And a big part of this movie was looking at those things, like, ‘Holy shit, these guys are rapists and racists.’ They did really bad stuff.” He pauses to consider his next words. “But they came from somewhere.”
