This article appeared in the July 12, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols, 2023)

The Bikeriders, adapted from the photographer Danny Lyon’s classic, same-named 1968 account of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club, likely represents the first time that a book of still pictures has been turned into a Hollywood movie. This is notable not just in the history of the photography book but also in Lyon’s career as an artist. He has always tried to find new ways to revisit and energize his own work—photo collages, personal essay films, memoirs, a blog. Now there is a feature film, greenlit by him and written and directed by Jeff Nichols, that centers on fictionalized versions of some of the characters in The Bikeriders. It faithfully restages many of Lyon’s most iconic pictures of the Outlaws (renamed the Vandals), and proceeds from the anecdotes and interpersonal dramas sketched out in the interviews he conducted with them.

Lyon’s original book has been fixed in memory for generations of photographers, so it’s easy to forget how fresh it must have felt when it first came out and how much it attempted to push the medium forward. The book is sometimes called an example of New Journalism, but it’s better understood as a self-portrait, a vision of a young man searching for a sense of himself in the people he photographs—scramble racers, army vets, truckers, Brando-worshippers, bug-eaters, and their wives and girlfriends on the blue-collar outskirts of Chicago. Prodded on by the influential photography curator Hugh Edwards, Lyon spent a couple years as a patched member of the Outlaws; he took pictures of the people he loved and the experiences he shared with them. But with their finesse and their lyrical depictions of machismo, the pictures also have a sort of subconscious; they are the kinds of images that might come to an older man in his dreams as he relives the sense memories of his youth: someone’s hair pulled taut by the wind as he speeds over a bridge, the glow of a jukebox in a woman’s eyes, a racer’s pale face splattered with gobs of black mud.

Nichols’s movie comes across as a strange appendage to Lyon’s book. A version of Lyon himself is played by Mike Faist, and the film never quite seems to know what to do with him as a character. He is passive and a bit self-effacing—a patient and fascinated observer rather than a passionately engaged artist. This is especially strange because Lyon’s book is so preoccupied with artistry in the lives of its subjects—one senses that Lyon joined the Outlaws as a kind of artist’s community, a traveling theater troupe, a group of people driven windward by love and joy and eros and grief, but also committed to refining their existence into an elevated, self-conscious, highly stylized performance. Lyon documented their scrapbooks, their tattoos, their clothes, the decoration of their homes, their way with language—not to mention their investment in their bikes as works of art. The club member Cal, in an interview recorded by Lyon, describes his admiration for an Outlaw riding a customized chopper: “Whatever he rides, man, part of that scooter is him, ’cause it’s got his ideas . . . All choppers are different . . . ’cause everybody’s melon’s different. Everybody thinks different.” The conviction that industrial or assembly-line parts, in the right combination, can be an extension of the self animates Lyon’s book, and is borne out in the practice of photography itself. (The Outlaws even visited Lyon’s first exhibition of Bikeriders work at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1966.) His pictures are attuned to the relationship of people to machines, to the intimacy and facility that one can have with a bike as with a camera, and to where that expertise might position you in society.

Nichols’s movie looks at all of this with a blank stare, mute on the idea of artistry as a guiding principle for Lyon and the people he was photographing. For all the film’s reverence for the pictures and text in Lyon’s book, it doesn’t have much to do with his poetic vision. It contains and redirects the explosion of meaning in Lyon’s photos, fitting them into a pro forma narrative about American decline as exemplified by the club’s increasing turn toward violence. There is a grain of historical truth in this: the Outlaws seemingly did expand their involvement in organized crime in the years after Lyon left. But this is an afterthought to Lyon’s images, which exist together as a kind of rhapsody in chrome. The pictures, burnished and replicated so elegantly in Nichols’s film, come to seem oddly disembodied there, floating in a plasma of half-hearted gangster-movie tropes that have little to do with the spirit of the book.

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It’s worth remembering that Lyon himself has had a lifelong filmmaking practice—one that grew out of the same impulses that led him to make The Bikeriders, but has also pushed him into a deeper line of self-reflection and formal experimentation. In their openness and their DIY approach, the dozen or so documentaries and essay films he’s made over the past 55 years contain the seeds of resistance to the kind of streamlined, polished professionalism that Nichols’s movie epitomizes.

They are also slippery and difficult to distill. Lyon is an avid fisherman; his films can seem to wriggle off the hook when you think you’ve caught them, constantly shifting their attention from one thing to another. An inebriate tattoo artist in Houston; the residents of Lyon’s adopted hometown of Bernalillo, New Mexico; a group of boys living on the streets of Santa Marta, Colombia; a demolition derby on the Jersey Shore; the photographs of Lyon’s own father; the petroglyphs of the American Southwest: Lyon makes space for all of these and more, sometimes in the course of a single movie. In a lull in conversation with a subject, he is just as liable to turn to some nearby graffiti on a brick wall (Murderers, 2005) or a teenager throwing rocks in the distance (Willie, 1985) as he is to probe someone’s face or a picture hung on a wall. The films have a sensitivity to pain and injustice, a willingness to immerse themselves in the world of undocumented immigrants, Chicano activists, detainees on death row. They also often have a goofiness to them, a light touch and a sense of theater. Lyon might splice together an interview with footage of a bug crawling across a street (Little Boy, 1977), or shots of the sculptor Mark di Suvero with images of Roman busts and medieval armor (Dear Mark, 1981). His decisions add up to a precise informality, a studied playfulness—the feeling of an untamable eye that answers only to its own idiosyncratic needs.

But as varied as they are, the films are steadfast in their focus on human ingenuity amid extreme conditions. Everything becomes a type of hallowed craftsmanship in front of Lyon’s camera: a boy cutting off the bottom half of his jeans with a shard of broken glass (Los niños abandonados, 1975); a group of kids spearing fish with a pitchfork (Llanito, 1971); a car mechanic fixing a wheel bearing (Wanderer, 2017). If the movies never quite have The Bikeriders’s sense of total romantic identification with a community, it might be because Lyon developed longer-term, more challenging relationships with the people he filmed. But these works often share the book’s interest in male sociality; Lyon is drawn to the cinematic possibilities of boys running around train tracks, to cowboy radio plays and son huasteco bands, and to men getting loaded, wrestling in a dusty yard, or working out at a prison gym.

Lyon had turned to filmmaking in earnest by the time he moved to New Mexico, the same period in which he finished his book of pictures inside a Texas penitentiary, Conversations with the Dead (1971). This was the early 1970s, and it would be another decade or so before photographic prints began to increase in value as collector’s items—a delay that also probably gave Lyon the opportunity to follow through on his growing interest in filmmaking. Lyon was scrappy, and the movies bear some of the traces of his improvised production process; he borrowed equipment, cobbled together grants, and once tried to hitchhike back to New York just to process film.

The movies also emerged after the brief time Lyon spent in New York in the late 1960s living and working with the photographer-filmmaker Robert Frank. Their friendship evidently left a profound impression on Lyon, whose later shorts about his family, Born to Film (1982) and Two Fathers (2005), seem to use Frank’s autobiographical Conversations in Vermont (1969) as a template. The two artists’ movies have other important similarities: they are deeply personal and also a bit withholding, mixing gracefulness and flow with provisional and halting rhythms; they have both a commitment to capturing reality and, sometimes, a sense of unreliable narration.

Over the years, Lyon’s work has become increasingly absorbed by the pressure that photography from the past exerts on perception itself: the mystery and wonder of looking at images of one’s own parents or children or friends, and the ways that a personal archive can be deployed and given new life. (His most recent film, 2020’s SNCC, is an extended and proud reappraisal of the pictures he took of the Civil Rights Movement as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s photographer.) And in the end, although he was only partially involved in Nichols’s film, Lyon’s blessing of the project illuminates something about these obsessions: one can imagine he found a certain visceral appeal in seeing his pictures come to life. In a recent interview with Aperture, he described visiting the set of The Bikeriders: “On a street corner was a bar, and when I stepped inside, it looked exactly like my pictures of the bar 60 years ago, only it was in color. I was transported back to my youth.” He mounts a prop bike, the same Triumph he used to ride: “I was twisting the throttle in my right hand, making the engine roar, and all I had to do was push down with my foot and put it into gear, lean forward to knock it off the kickstand, and I would be riding that bike—my old bike—off into the night. I just didn’t have the guts to do it.” It’s a moving story. But you wonder, just a little bit, what might have happened if Lyon had stolen a camera and ridden straight off set.

Danny Lyon’s films are available to stream on his Vimeo page.

David Beal lives and works in New York.