For two days in the fall of 2022, Danny Lyon was transported back to his distant motorcycling past. The celebrated photographer was in Cincinnati visiting the set of “The Bikeriders,” a drama based on his 1968 book of photographs and interviews that documented the early years of an illegal motorcycle club.
The production recreated the gang's rough-hewn clubhouse in a corner bar, where writer-director Jeff Nichols was setting up a shot. And parked right outside was a row of vintage motorcycles, including one that looked like Lyon's old 650cc Triumph. Lyon hadn't ridden one in years.
“So I get on the bike and I feel really good,” Lyon remembers. “I look down and there's a little wrench next to the oil tank. And I'm like, 'Oh, I wonder if it starts?'” Lyon then turned the key and tried to breathe life into the ancient machine. “It starts and explodes like a World War I artillery barrage, it's very loud. A hundred people turn around and stare at me.
“Oh, I wanted to go so bad,” Lyon, 82, says, laughing, by phone from his home in New Mexico. “I just wanted to turn the corner like I used to when I was 25.”
Nichols, who had dreamed of translating Lyon's book into a film for two decades and was in the middle of a tight 41-day shoot, remembers the moment. “My producer literally almost jumped out of his shoes trying to stop him,” Nichols remembers. “Danny is either an instigator or a rebel. “It was exciting and also terrifying to see an 80-year-old man do that.”
Austin Butler, right, in the movie “The Bikeriders.”
(Kyle Kaplan / Focus Features)
Lyon and the production survived their two days on set. “The Bikeriders” opens Friday as a highly anticipated feature film starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy, after earning rave reviews at Telluride last year. Its release was delayed by the SAG-AFTRA strike, as the actors would not be able to promote the film, and it was removed from Disney's schedule, leading production company New Regency to look for a new distributor in Focus Features.
It tells a tough but romantic story of the motorcycle club Lyon joined and documented in the mid-1960s on Chicago's North Side, with vivid moments of camaraderie and brutal scenes on the road. They were a group of young Americans who rejected mainstream society, and for two years Lyon wore the colors as a full member of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club. (The club is called Vandals in the movie).
“It's really about these blue-collar guys who loved motorcycles and loved each other, and there were some amazing people among them,” Lyon says. “Those were the guys I tried to do the book about. And they looked great too.”
The project came after more serious work: Lyon had spent time in the Mississippi Delta documenting the civil rights movement while an active member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, when he was roommate of activist and future congressman John Lewis. He would later spend nearly two years inside Texas prisons documenting the lives and conditions there, immersive photography that has been described as the visual equivalent of the New Journalism of the era popularized by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.
Lyon eventually joined the esteemed Magnum photography agency and lived for a time with photographer Robert Frank. He rarely accepted outside commissions, but spent two weeks taking photographs in Death Valley on the set of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 film “Zabriskie Point,” and for three days in 1970 he photographed Muhammad Ali training in Miami for Sunday Times in London. That same year, he left New York for New Mexico and built a house there, where he has resided ever since. It's a life story he tells in his new memoir, “This Is My Life I'm Talking About.”
“The Bikeriders” remains his best-known work, which took its final form after a book editor in New York advised Lyon that he needed some meaningful text to accompany the images. The photographer returned to Chicago with a portable reel-to-reel recorder to capture the voices and stories behind the black-and-white images. Lyon rode and partied with the Outlaws, but remained committed to his work.
The real-life Benny Bauer, the 19-year-old Chicago Outlaw member, photographed by Danny Lyon for the book that would become “The Bikeriders.”
(Danny Lyon)
“If you want to take pictures, I speak for myself, you shouldn't be drunk. You shouldn't be too high. You shouldn't crash your motorcycle. And you have to focus it, develop the film and you can't really be a [screw] up,” advises Lyon.
“I wanted to be an artist. I am a university graduate. Of course, I did this for all intellectual reasons. But as time has passed and I have gotten older, I think I did it for the adventure,” he admits. “These guys were all half crazy, but they rode motorcycles. I did these races with them. The emotion was incredible.”
Director Nichols was about 25 when he first saw a copy of “The Bikeriders” in the Memphis apartment of his older brother, Ben, of the indie-rock band Lucero. A couple of years later, the singer-guitarist released a song of the same name, with urgent lyrics that seemed ripped from the book's pages: “Kathy's been with Benny Bauer since that night… She's seen more prisons, courts and lawyers than her. I like to say”.
As a budding filmmaker, Nichols' younger brother also saw cinematic possibilities in the book's photographs and interviews. Several of the book's most distinctive images are visually recreated in the film.
“It's amazing how much Danny got these people talking and letting off steam with his stories,” says Nichols, 45, an independent filmmaker born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, acclaimed for a series of dramatic feature films focused largely on in the American South, including “Take Shelter,” “Mud,” and “Loving.”
Mike Faist, left, and director Jeff Nichols on the set of “The Bikeriders.”
(Kyle Kaplan / Focus Features)
“Their stories begin to get complicated. “They are quite simple, sometimes cruel, sometimes hilarious.”
The copy of “The Bikeriders” that Nichols first saw was a later edition and included several previously unpublished color photographs. He found the additions essential to finding the story of his film, as they offered additional texture and a new introduction by Lyon that explored what happened to some of the people he had photographed years before.
The history of the motorcycle club became much darker in the early '70s, after Lyon moved on to other issues. As shown in the film, the anti-establishment club evolved into an organized criminal gang and left many victims.
Filmmakers had already pitched ideas for filming “The Bikeriders,” but Nichols was the first to officially option the book. Unlike his previous projects, Nichols did not outline an outline before writing the script. Instead, he slowly built the world of these bikers out of disconnected moments and experiences, before latching onto a darker plot in the film's second half.
“I wanted the first hour to really flow and not be based on a particular narrative,” says Nichols, who also learned to ride a motorcycle during the writing process, “because I didn't want to be a complete fraud.”
Playing Lyon in the film is actor Mike Faist, who had just wrapped work on Luca Guadagnino's tennis trio “Challengers” when Nichols approached him. After working on the acclaimed and intensely emotional film, Faist planned to relax for the rest of the year, but was drawn to both the material and the caliber of actors Nichols was hiring.
“To tell you the truth, it was very nice to get rid of the 'Challengers,' as satisfying an experience as it was,” says Faist, 32, during a Zoom interview. “I was really exhausted and I had given a lot. … I felt like 'Bikeriders' was a gift for Mike, the actor, to be inspired again by watching all these incredible people do their jobs.”
He was also inspired by the example of Lyon. Faist arrived at his cabin in Maine, where Lyon showed the actor how to use the Nikon Model F camera. They also did some fishing while the actor learned about Lyon's deep history as an independent photographer and filmmaker.
“He really has a soft spot for people who are just rejected by society, who are marginalized, who are told they're not allowed to sit at the table,” Faist says. “He really loves these people.”
Jodie Comer and Austin Butler in “The Bikeriders” from director Jeff Nichols.
(Kyle Kaplan / Focus Features)
Lyon was equally impressed with the authenticity of the film, which lacks the nostalgic gloss of so many period films but remains raw and vital. On the one hand, he is amazed at how Comer so vividly recreated the distinctive Chicago accent of Kathy, wife of young biker “Benny” (Butler). Lyon remembers Kathy as “a brilliant speaker; she was a real riot.”
In one scene from the film, Kathy talks to Danny de Faist about the contradictions of biker culture while folding laundry: “With all these guys, none of them could follow a rule to save their life, you know?… You get them together and they come into this club and suddenly they make up all these rules for everyone to follow. It's absolutely ridiculous, you know?
One of the most memorable motorcyclists depicted in the film is Zipco, a Latvian immigrant who Lyon once interviewed at length while in the hospital after a drunken riding accident. An excerpt from the book is recreated in a scene in which Zipco angrily laments about being rejected by the military.
Zipco, a lumbering presence in black leather, tattered hair and a coat of dirt, is played by Nichols regular Michael Shannon, who “is absolutely incredible,” Lyon says. “He looks like Zipco, drools like Zipco; this guy smells like Zipco. And he is talking to the supposed photographer, who for him is like an insect.”
“Jeff took the book and turned it into this movie, which is a huge accomplishment,” Lyon says, still in awe. Earlier this week, Lyon attended the premiere at the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood and posted a photo on Instagram of Butler on the red carpet, writing, “What started in Hyde Park, Chicago in 1965. Crazy.”
But “The Bikeriders” is just one chapter in an eventful life. Lyon's time chronicling the Texas prison system, traveling through South America and many other adventures may seem equally ripe for a possible transition to the screen. It has not gone unnoticed.
“I actually thought about it,” Nichols says. “I haven't really pursued it, but it would be an amazing series. “His story is extraordinary.”
