Johnny got the idea to start his motorcycle club from the movies. Blame it on Brando, ghostlike in black-and-white on the living room TV set. In an early scene of Jeff Nichols’s 2024 film The Bikeriders, Johnny (Tom Hardy) watches The Wild One. His wife flips through a magazine beside him, and his daughters dart around the house. But his eyes remain fixed—

“Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” says a woman on the screen. 

“Whaddaya got?” answers Brando. 

“Whaddaya got?” Johnny repeats under his breath, smirking.

This origin story is fitting for a movie based on images. The Bikeriders is adapted from a 1968 book of the same name by photographer Danny Lyon. From 1963 to 1967, Lyon documented the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club (fictionalized in the film as the Chicago Vandals), even becoming a member. He later went to New York to sell his pictures, facing a string of rejections until MacMillan bought the book—and sold it in paperback for $2.95 a pop, with the category label “Adventure” on the back. This first edition contained an introduction by Lyon, two photo sequences, and transcripts of tape-recorded interviews with the subjects. 

When I turn the pages past Lyon’s introduction, the grinning and fervent face of a young bikerider greets me. I don’t recognize him, but I pause to meet his gaze through the distance of half a century. I sense a whole story—fine, MacMillan, an “Adventure”—lurking in his wild eyes.

Lyon describes The Bikeriders as “a personal record, dealing mostly with bikeriders whom I know and care for.” His work is a nonfiction counterpoint to an image that, at the time, Hollywood was repeatedly enforcing in a whole subgenre of exploitation films (The Wild Angels, Devil’s Angels, Angels From Hell, Hell’s Angels ‘69 and Hell’s Angels On Wheels, to name a few). Nichols’s film draws its characters from Lyon’s real people. There’s Johnny, the fearsome leader of the Vandals; Benny (Austin Butler), a firebrand Vandal and Johnny’s mentee; and the tenacious Kathy (Jodie Comer), Benny’s wife and the film’s narrator. The film’s tension originates from a quasi-love triangle between Benny, Kathy and Johnny. Benny is the central character, though he hardly has much to say. Butler mumbles and moves in slow-motion as low barroom light paints him honey-gold, as if he is already a statue. Times change around them, and what begins as joyrides among friends ends up as a criminal gang. “Innocence” is over. Nichols idealizes the youth not of his characters but of their scene, and in doing so, imagines a national past at once rugged and sanitized. Lyon’s book conveys more depth. A scanned news clipping reveals that Benny is only 19. Other bikeriders are 22 and 25, decades younger than the actors who play them. They’re practically boys, toughened so early—why, how? Unwieldy contradictions and shadows of stories emerge in the transcripts. There are hints of America as a war machine, of masculinity as a conduit for violence. While the film’s narration draws verbatim from this text—with Mike Faist playing photographer Danny, dutifully holding a tape recorder—Nichols couldn’t include everything. What didn’t make the cut feels too fragile, too intense, for the big screen’s broad strokes. 

The adaptation of nonfiction stories into narrative films is nothing new. In the country of Hollywood and school district book bans, it is often through pop culture that we first encounter pockets of our nation’s history. This has obvious flaws: big-budget films are primarily made for entertainment and money, not education, and they can replicate the biases of written history to further national propaganda rather than critique it. But at their best, adaptations of real stories can bring past events to life for new audiences and even generations, honoring what once was by remembering it with care. 

While many of these films take direct inspiration from nonfiction books—just last year, Killers Of The Flower Moon and American Prometheus: The Triumph And Tragedy Of J. Robert Oppenheimer both received Hollywood treatments—a film based on a photo book is rarer. This form presents its own challenges and opportunities. The photo book typically offers less detailed context than a thoroughly researched historical text. There are more gaps, more space for interpretation. Yet strong photographs possess the intimacy of a firsthand account. The artist must be physically present, sharing space and time with the subject, to capture them. Thoughtful sequencing of these images can transform them into a chorus in which they deepen and complicate each other. 

But by the film’s end, it’s hard to say who “Danny,” the photographer, really is, or why he’s drawn to these people. The characters feel evasive and inscrutable, as if our lens was that of a passerby turning their head to follow a Harley’s harsh roar rather than a club member who’s been riding along the whole time. As the biker does for passersby, the film gives audiences romance, intrigue, and maybe a laugh, but misses out on something deeper: that intensity pulsing through Lyon’s pictures, the blood rushing, the conflict and ardor that come with really knowing somebody.

This is not at all to say that fiction can’t hold vitality. Take Johnny’s own inspiration at the hands of The Wild One, a narrative film also inspired by actual events. In 1953, it borrowed its plot from a 1951 short story inspired by the real-life “Hollister riot” of 1947, in which thousands of bikers descended upon a quaint California town in advance of a rally. As gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson writes in his book Hell’s Angels, The Wild One “told a story that was only beginning to happen and which was inevitably influenced by the film.” It articulated collective discontents and desires. It inspired action. 

So why make a movie about mid-century American bikers in 2024? As flawed as these clubs were, elements of their structure are radical: tight-knit community in defiance of government authority. I imagine this was not lost on Lyon, whose art is deeply engaged with social issues. Before joining the Outlaws, he documented the civil rights movement and lived with future congressman John Lewis, who urged Americans to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of America.” When asked in an interview about contemporary subcultures that share the bikerider’s spirit, Lyon answers: “the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux fighting the oil pipeline and the catastrophe of climate change.” 

Lyon’s pictures are romantic, with their rich shadows and wide-open skies, but they’re not merely about the appeal of tattoos, leather, and chrome. They depict the thrill and precarity of life lived in opposition to the establishment. But Nichols, in his translation of independent photojournalism to a star-spangled film, conveys the nostalgic aura of the past more than the radical potential of its spirit. “Rebels and rebellion are one of the saving graces of America,” says Lyon. Our country is in dire need of them now, and Hollywood is certainly not giving them to us. Make like Lyon and look to the streets instead.

In his book’s introduction, Lyon expresses concern that fictional representations could cause the bikerider to “perish on the coffee tables of America.” Yet he concludes, “This attention doesn’t have the strength of reality of the people it aspires to know, and that as long as Harley-Davidsons are manufactured other bikeriders will appear, riding unknown and beautiful through Chicago, into the streets of Cicero.” That “strength of reality” is this: while Nichols’s bikeriders call to mind Brando and Dean impersonators, Lyon’s bikeriders remind me of my little brother, a 23-year-old classic car mechanic who assembled his Honda Grom in our garage using spare parts sourced on Facebook Marketplace. Someone real, someone I love. 

The book’s final spread provides an evocative moment of contrast. The first picture shows the bikeriders dressed in black, carrying the casket at a club member’s funeral as the sun beats down and casts prison-cell shadows. This somber moment sits next to an iconic image of the 1960s: Crossing The Ohio, Louisville, in which a lone bikerider speeds over a bridge. A whole spectrum of life exists between these two frames. Next to the funeral procession, Crossing The Ohio pulses with beauty and desperation. Its glimpse of freedom becomes urgent. In the wake of wartime and amid the society that discards them, these men—young and lost, injured and violent—would die to feel that alive. 

The bikerider in Crossing The Ohio looks back over his shoulder as he speeds ahead, his dark hair flying. The film mirrors this shot, with Benny striking its pose. But a crucial difference stands out: the picture’s unknown bikerider faces away from the lens, while Butler turns toward the audience. This departure transforms an anonymous figure into a celebrity. While the picture gives less explicit information about the man on the bike, this openness suggests a far vaster world. The film instead appeals to its marketplace, as if to say: Don’t worry, he’s not really dangerous. He’s your favorite heartthrob. 

Taylor Stout is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.