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The Arts Intel Report

The Bikeriders

Austin Butler as Benny in The Bikeriders.

Streaming on Theaters

Next to Robert Frank’s The Americans, there may be no book of midcentury American photography more influential than The Bikeriders, Danny Lyon’s landmark work from 1968. It’s not just the unforgettable photographs, which focus on the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club; it’s also the text that accompanies them—intimate, revealing interviews with the riders and their women that Lyon, a twentysomething armed with nothing but a Rolleiflex, a Nikon, and a seven-pound reel-to-reel tape recorder, captured during the three years he spent among the Outlaws. Almost 60 years later, Lyon’s taut, 128-page book still vibrates with the propulsive power of a film. No wonder, then, that Hollywood has finally succeeded in adapting the book into a movie of the same name, starring Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Mike Faist (as Lyon, and, lately, of Challengers), and written and directed by Jeff Nichols. —Michael Hainey