The things Michael Shannon makes me watch. He plays a ruffled, dented and essentially bemused biker who belongs to the original cohort of Tom Hardy's Vandals motorcycle club out of Chicago once upon a 1960s. Things go to hell when the blokes returning from Việt Nam bring the horse back with them, but unobserved by the reviewers, "The Kid" (Toby Wallace, similarly dead eyed and creepy in The Royal Hotel) who eventually does Hardy in is not a vet. This suggests the culture of the day was already rotting on vectors not explored here.
Along for the ride is Damon Herriman who can bash out these roughened characters all day, any day with any accent you wish, and laconic Austin Butler who was apparently Elvis recently. Notionally Jodie Comer narrates but is too self-absorbed in her affected, annoying performance (that accent/voice that wanders, that vapid character, those calculating eyes that don't match the facial expression) that put me in mind of Meryl Streep. (I grant that she is less inert than she was in The Last Duel.) And that's Norman Reedus from The Boondock Saints, channelling Dennis Hopper by gibbering on a chopper. Hardy shuffles along as the same old mumbling hood.
There are absolutely no stakes and everyone dies! — or should have died but just got injured or disappeared for a bit or whatever. Too many scenes fall flat. And have we not seen all of this before in classic American cinema: The Wild One, Rebel without a Cause and (not) Easy Rider? Or Hunter S. Thompson's book Hell's Angels of 1967? Was the world also gagging for a reheat of this genre? The insatiable thirst for retro has consumed everything forward looking.
I haven't seen anything by writer/director Jeff Nichols before this. The reviews are so universally fawning they must be about some other movie. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. "For the most part, the main performers have the highly polished sheen of most contemporary American actors, Michael Shannon's Vandal, Zipco, and some artfully gnarly teeth notwithstanding; like the movie itself, they're designed to please and do." OK ... Luke Goodsell: tragic masculinity, Butler as James Dean or Mickey Rourke (Rumble Fish came to my mind, The Outsiders to his). "In a supporting performance that might be the movie's best, longtime Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon captures the conflict as an old-school burnout adrift in a new world." Mean Streets. Ambition and execution are far apart. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Austin Butler during the Australian promo tour. Violent? I think not; there's not even a menacing atmosphere. Butler and Comer do not have any romantic scenes. Comer aimed to clone original source Kathy Bauer. It's a bit Scorsese. It's a hetero/homo love triangle. And so on and on. Most concur that it's a bright shiny dog but endorse it anyway.
