Austin Butler Enters The Movie Star Debate In 'The Bikeriders.' Plus, 'Kinds of Kindness'
#277: "The Bikeriders," "Kinds of Kindness"
Edition 277:
Hey movie lovers!
PROGRAMMING NOTE: There will be a special edition of the newsletter going out detailing my night at the Hollywood premiere for MaXXXine a little later. I originally had it at the top of this post but it turned out to be too long. So for now, it’s just a write-up of two other theater releases this week.
First, we’ll talk about Austin Butler’s movie star ascendance in The Bikeriders, then Yorgos Lanthimos coming back down to earth in Kinds of Kindness. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” maybe the dumbest movie trailer I’ve ever seen.
The Bikeriders
For all the laurels being heaped on Glenn Powell lately as Hollywood’s movie star heir apparent, there’s just such an obvious difference between his essence on screen and that of Austin Butler, who I am on record as saying is THE male movie star out of this rising class (including Chalamet, Holland, Mescal, Elordi etc.).
Powell’s energy, while palpable, exudes an incredible amount of effort. He wants audiences to love him so badly. Early Bradley Cooper is actually a great comp for Powell in that way, although I don’t think Powell will career turn into pretentious artiste mode. Meanwhile, Butler is effortless cool personified, that quality of a Steve McQueen, Kevin Costner or more recently Brad Pitt.
The Bikeriders is built entire around this quality of Butler, who plays a biker named Benny that is a tractor beam of charisma but completely inaccessible. He doesn’t want anything from anyone and doesn’t want anyone to want anything from him, despite being caught in a pseudo love triangle between Jodie Comer — his wife and the narrator of the movie — and Tom Hardy — the leader of the Vandals biker gang.
The movie is an adaptation of a book of photographs of the gang in the late 60s and early 70s, and recreates the aesthetic of greasy Boomers extremely well. Riding of a motorcycle has never looked so elegant, and yet the movie captures well the kind of primal fear that a gang of bikers can enstill when they’re all revving their engines.
Comer, truly one of my favorite actresses working today, is the female salve meant to cut through the rest of the movie’s serious dude energy. Some people might be bothered by her squeaky voice, but the movie needs her comedy, her energy as well as her literal words, because Butler’s character only says maybe 100 words the whole movie and Hardy’s character hardly many more.
Hardy, somewhat hilariously, has been trying to play Al Capone for his entire career (including the one time he did play him, disastrously, in Capone). This might be the closest he’s ever come, a menacing yet relatable godfather figure that represents some of his best work in a decade.
To enjoy this movie, a viewer must surrender him or herself to the vibe of it. The plot lacks structure and feels pretty episodic, preserving the feel of a photograph book feel of “this thing happened, then this other thing happened.” The movie also deprives a viewer of an easy takeaway. It’s more abstract, beckoning you to think about the ways American masculinity changed during that very disruptive decade.
All that might come across too heady, were it not for the great hangs provided by the cast and specifically Butler, who is so aspirational he’s almost angelic. The shades of Elvis are still kind of in there even as the voice slowly fades away (thank goodness), and if I were casting a young hot leading man in a movie in the next couple years, he would be my choice.
Kinds of Kindness
Theaters
No success story baffled me more than Poor Things at the end of last year, which was a semi-hit despite what would appear on paper to be not a lot of commercial appeal (then again, as the old adage goes, sex sells). For a hot second, everyone was talking as if we had to consider Yorgos Lanthimos as a *ehem* Major Filmmaker, a needle mover in the industry — this the guy who made batshit crazy movies like The Lobster, The Killing of the Sacred Deer and Dogtooth.
Lanthimos really is more of a Steven Soderbergh type, a kind of experimentalist who is very specific and even more prolific (he has another movie planned for 2025 release, making it three in three years). Frankly, this movie has a $15 million budget with major stars — Emma Stone (re-teaming after her Oscar win for Poor Things), Jesse Plemons (Oscar nominee), Willem Dafoe (4x Oscar nominee), Margaret Qualley (rising star), Hong Chau (recent Oscar nominee) — so he should be able to do whatever he wants.
But also this is, characteristically, an incredibly weird movie. No, scratch that. It’s three mini movies, crammed together, all unrelated to each other in plot or character but with the same cast and a similar theme. As someone who loves movies I’m pretty allergic to this truncated format, and to me a full version of any of the three stories would’ve been more interesting than a taste of all three (especially when you factor in a 2hr44min runtime).
Easily the best of these stories is the first, which plays on the control people give to their jobs by casting Plemons as a kind of impotent man who gets instructed on every detail of his life (down to what to eat and when to sleep with his wife) by his boss, Dafoe. When he finally says no, to killing someone, he gets fired, and his newfound freedom causes him to go crazy.
As is the Lanthimos style, the dialogue is stilted and the vibe is incredibly unnerving. The content stops short of horror, but anyone who has seen his movies knows he is no stranger to vulgarity (especially sexually). There are some purposely shocking images in this movie. And each of the story’s does raise some really interesting ideas, each playing out very similarly to an episode of “Black Mirror.”
This is simply the case of a director being undeniably talented, producing his precise vision to the highest quality, and me just not really vibing with it. That’s okay!
Too often, when I’m having movie conversations with people and they feel this way they’re ashamed because they feel like they’re supposed to like the quote-unquote great works. I always say as long as you can appreciate the art and craft of a thing, and are willing to continue to expose yourself to it (for example, I will definitely go see Lanthimos’ movie in 2025), you’re more than welcome to dislike something. And so Kinds of Kindness didn’t really work for me.
Trailer Watch: Red One
Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a new belt holder for Dumbest Movie Trailer of All Time (previous champions include Fatman and The Great Wall). Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans seem dead set on lighting as much streaming money on fire as possible with bloated blockbusters that are so bad it’s almost offensive to the rest of the movie industry.
Here’s the premise of this movie — Santa (JK Simmons) gets kidnapped, and The Rock’s E.L.F. (which literally stands for Extremely Large and Formidable) hires Evans’ tracker to hunt him down. Features from the trailer include a slap fight with Krampus and hand-to-ice combat with snowmen….on a beach? If this trailer was shown on “Saturday Night Live” as a pre-taped segment it would get huge laughs.