‘The Bikeriders’ Can’t Outrace All the Clichés

Watching television with his wife and young daughters one night in the mid-1960s, Johnny (Tom Hardy), a roughneck, spiritually stifled truck driver, stumbles across a prime-time broadcast of 1953’s The Wild One—a seminal depiction of biker gang rituals that also doubled as a showcase for the white-hot charisma of the young Marlon Brando. (“Mr. Brando is vicious and relentless,” opined The New York Times, admiringly.) The girls aren’t interested, but Dad’s riveted. “Whataya got?” he murmurs to himself, echoing the defiant mantra of Brando’s antiheroic Johnny Strabler, whose rhetoric of rebellion for the hell of it resonates with this suburban family man on some deep, prefrontal level. (It helps, perhaps, that they share a first name.)