How to describe The Bikeriders, the beautifully formless new film by writer-director Jeff Nichols? An acting showcase, the production moves its characters about but offers little in the way of traditional plotting. A marriage story, it nevertheless encompasses the loss of national innocence and the professionalization of American crime. Perhaps the best thing to say of the new picture is that it is about its subjects: the members of a lightly fictionalized motorcycle club in Vietnam War-era Illinois. Based on a photobook of the same name by Danny Lyon, the film plays like a collection of snapshots. What they add up to is Nichols’s best work in years. 

The movie stars Austin Butler as Benny Cross, a Chicago bike hound whom we meet on the cusp of an altercation. Wearing his club “colors” in a bar in 1969, Benny attracts the attention of two crosstown rivals boasting murderous expressions. Rather than back down, our young man jaws off, provoking a fight that nearly costs him his life. But isn’t that a smirk we see on his face when, about to be jumped, he reaches for his knife?