No one has ever been prettier than Austin Butler in The Bikeriders
This preview of The Bikeriders comes from the film’s European premiere at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival. The film will be released in December.
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, who played Elvis in 2022’s Best Picture Oscar nominee Elvis, should with his next role 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. 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
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