With multiple seasons of Sons of Anarchy out there that I have no interest in, perhaps The Bikeriders wasn’t a movie exactly for me. And it wasn’t. Whoever made this drastically over-estimated my interest in a shaggy, plotless biker gang film.

The flick is set in the mid to late 60s and follows multiple stories of a biker gang in Illinois. It’s told through flashbacks from the perspective of Jodie Comer, the main squeeze of biker Austen Butler. Structurally, the film is more of an anthology of things that happened to the gang.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a through-line to this film and that left me uninterested and bored. The only time it gets dangerously close to a plot is with leader of the pack Tom Hardy wanting to turn over the “Club” to Butler. But a lot of it is just “that one time Biker X wanted to quit” or “That one time biker Y from California showed up” or whatever. Two hours of this rambling was way more than I had any interest.

And yet some of these short stories were of some interest. Individual moments largely driven by the quality of the acting kept my focus… until the subplot fizzled and we snapped out of the flashback for a setup of a new story.

And, yes, the acting is generally very good… though I couldn’t help but be annoyed at the reedy voice Tom Hardy uses. It made me wish he’d just do a Venom growl instead and drop the high pitched, nasal whine he was using.

This movie wasn’t for me as not-a-fan of biker gang stories in general and shaggy, aimless, directionless biker gang stories in particular. If there had been a better ongoing plot, I might have liked it. But without that… the movie was a great big shrug. It kept making me think these yahoos should just just quit this loser gang. Go about your life… leave these cool guys in the rearview.

Score: 73