Maybe I secretly want to join a '60s biker gang?

“The Bikeriders” makes a grimy, gritty life look awfully appealing.

Johnny (Tom Hardy) is a family man, watching an impossibly tiny TV in his house in 1960s Chicago. The 1953 biker movie “The Wild One” is on. The picture is blurry and grainy, but when Marlon Brando is asked what he’s rebelling against, and he responds “What have you got?” it changes something forever inside Johnny.

I didn’t have that level of a response to watching “The Bikeriders” – I’ll stick with my Peloton, thanks. And writer-director Jeff Nichols strenuously avoids any sort of emotional mythmaking in depicting the rise and fall of a fictional ‘60s biker “club,” the Chicago Vandals. It’s not supposed to “get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway,’” as Steppenwolf once sang.

Instead, the appeal of “The Bikeriders” is more anthropological. Perhaps because it was inspired by the photography book by Danny Lyon, “The Bikeriders” is immersed in the sights, sounds and aromas of this long-lost subculture – you can practically smell the distinctive fragrance of mud, gasoline, beer and cigarettes emanating off the screen. Nichols makes this sweaty, rowdy environment, with its drunken fistfights and all-night parties, seem somehow alluring.

Another movie would have made Danny (Mike Faist) an on-screen surrogate for the audience, a college kid who enters this closed-off world. But Danny mostly stays on the margins with his camera, recording interviews with Kathy (Jodie Comer), the wife of the Vandals’ golden boy rider, Benny (Austin Butler).

But even she is an observer, at first intoxicated by the biker life and later repelled, rather than a participant in the action. Nichols is more interested in the Vandals as a unit, the hierarchy and rivalries among the riders, the rituals and codes that bind them together. 

(Photos courtesy of Focus Features)

Benny is the only one of them who seems closest to the myth that Johnny and the rest of them are chasing. In the opening scene, Butler is bathed in golden light as he defiantly wears his club colors in a non-club bar. When they haul him outside to beat him up, his face lights up with almost childish glee as he draws a switchblade across one of their faces. That glee is held in freeze-frame, as we see the other thug’s shovel about to make contact with the back of Benny’s head. Those moments of joy are fleeting even for Benny, and come with quite a headache after.. 

The rest of the Vandals seem like regular working-class guys, bound together by a love of bikes and a burning desire to drink and fight. Nichols has cast a rogue’s gallery of terrific character actors (Michael Shannon, Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus, Damon Herriman). It’s just wonderful to watch them inhabit these characters, part men and part boys, and this specific, cloistered world. These are not nice guys, but they’re fascinating.

Perhaps because Nichols’ had Lyons’ photos to work with, every detail of this ‘60s Midwestern world (the film was shot in and around Cincinnati) feels just right, from the glass-brick windows on the Vandals’ bar to the appliances in Kathy’s kitchen. It’s like the scenes could have been recreated from the Polaroids that fill the old family albums on my parents’ shelves.

Comer’s chirpy Midwestern accent as Kathy has been polarizing for some critics, and it may seem like she’s auditioning for Season 6 of “Fargo.” But listen to the original recorded interviews of Kathy, and she’s pretty much spot on. Like so much of what we see and hear of “Bikeriders,” it’s an accent that’s specific to a time as well as a place, now gone forever.

The third act is sort of “Goodfellas” on two wheels as the Vandals implode, under pressure from eager new guys and smack-addled Vietnam vets who push the club in a more violent and overtly criminal direction. 

Somehow “Bikeriders’ convinces us that the earlier era, one of fistfights and knife fights and bars being burned to the ground, was almost idyllic compared to what came next. It’s a ride down Memory Lane back to a simpler if not better time, one that couldn’t last.

“Bikeriders” is now playing in theaters, and comes to VOD on July 9.