No one has ever been prettier than Austin Butler in The Bikeriders

polygon.com:

This essay on The Bikeriders was originally written for the film’s European premiere at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival. It has been updated for the movie’s theatrical release.

Elvis Presley’s sadly unfulfilled ambition for his movie career was to be the next James Dean. So it’s an ironic coincidence that Austin Butler, after playing Elvis in 2022’s Best Picture Oscar nominee Elvis, should now take direct aim at the kind of simmering yet poised, unutterably cool and devastatingly handsome role that James Dean typified in the 1950s — and score a bullseye. He brought a particularly creepy animal magnetism to Dune: Part Two, but it is absolutely ridiculous how good he looks in The Bikeriders.

The movie is a motorcycle-gang drama set in the 1960s, starring Butler as Benny, a laconic yet hotheaded member of a Chicago biker club, the Vandals. As Benny, Butler has artfully mussed, greased blonde hair and a scruffy goatee. He wears many layers of frayed, often sleeveless denim and leather, and rings on most of his fingers. He smokes. He plays pool. He leans on things a lot. He’s a man of few words who mostly mooches around the scene lankily, or stares into the middle distance with moody intensity. But sometimes he bursts into violent action.

And of course he rides a huge, growling chopper. (Be sure to see The Bikeriders in the loudest theater you can find, if you want to feel every bark and roar from the bikes, and every swooning Shangri-Las needle drop in your ribcage.) He has a signature move where he rides his bike one-handed in an absurdly cool, offhand way, like this:

Here’s another still of the one-handed bike-riding thing. This shot is actually a direct quote from a 1968 photojournalism book, also called The Bikeriders, which the movie is based on. Director Jeff Nichols (Mud, Midnight Special) first saw the book 20 years ago and had been thinking about adapting it for a long time, because of its themes of masculinity and identity, but also because it looked so