The film draws on many of the actual bikers who Lyon hung out with, including Austin Butler as Benny, the gang's wildest and most charismatic member, with Jodie Comer as his girl Kathy and Tom Hardy as Johnny, the leader of the group.
Growing popular concurrent with the actual rise of the motorcycle club in the US, the genre also waned after the real-life counterparts – which began as social hubs for hobbyist mechanics and racers – degenerated into organised crime.
Told in flashback using Kathy's voiceover, the film luxuriates in the mythic and OTT elements of the iconography: the motorcycle boots, jackets, cigarettes, and rubber squeals that are familiar to any of us who have watched biker movies of the era.
Responsible for the early careers of Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, and many others, he would seize on the box-office phenomenon of Easy Rider (1969) to make a whole host of flicks about countercultural – or even frenzied criminal – motorcycle gangs.
Equally, in The Bikeriders, as time goes on we begin to see the rift between the "pot smokers" and the "beer drinkers", who were the earlier members and not drugtakers – a real discord occurred in the latter part of the 60s and into the 70s, largely due to returning Vietnam veterans swelling the ranks of motorcycle clubs, whose drug use often went beyond marijuana.
In the 60s, The Shangri-Las sighed, pined, and swooned over dead biker boyfriends in their haunting music – their 1964 hit Leader of the Pack, as Nichols points out, actually has motor engines revving in the background, and the song of theirs he uses as a motif throughout The Bikeriders – 1965's Out in the Street – echoes across the film.
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