People sometimes talk about summer as though every week is crammed with a new big studio movie or two, all bursting onto the scene atop of tidal wave of hype and jostling for the attention of the audience. I don't remember it ever actually being that way, even before the pandemic; there have always been quiet stretches between the big blockbusters, simply because these big films need time to make their big budgets back. It used to be that you got a few big releases round about Memorial Day in the US, marking the beginning of summer, and then possibly another clump around American Independence Day – until the early 2000s there was a time lag for other territories, because it would have been incredibly expensive to have that many prints of a film struck. There was a two month gap between the American release of The Phantom Menace and its European appearance; this was down to two weeks for Spider-Man in 2002 and had disappeared entirely a couple of years after that.

Jeff Nichols' The Bikeriders came out this month, which was a change from the original plan for an award seasons release last year. This was another consequence of the Hollywood strikes which have caused so many recent headaches in the industry and seem likely to have an impact on next year's awards season – for instance, Dune 2 was meant to be an awards contender, but it'll be a year old by next spring, and likely to be eclipsed by more recent films. Apart from the gongs, traditional big movies do seem to be thin on the ground this year, with most of the big franchises apparently taking a year off or doing something quirky – the smart money for biggest film of the year is on Deadpool and Wolverine, technically the fourteenth (I think) entry in the long-running X-Men series, though given a radical new coat of paint as it's subsumed into the main Marvel project. Nobody was expecting something like the Twister sequel to have a shot at being one of the biggest films of the summer; The Bikeriders doesn't feel like big summer hit material, either.

(Is 'bikerider' even really a word, anyway? I mean, 'bike rider', okay, but isn't 'cyclist' or 'motorcyclist' or just plain 'biker' a more natural piece of English? There's just something intangibly odd about it, a clumsy grope in the direction of coolness which never really connects. In this respect the title turns out to be fairly representative of the movie, as it turns out.)

Anyway: between 1963 and 1967 the photojournalist Danny Lyon (here played by Mike Faist) interviewed and took photos of people associated with an American motorcycle gang named the Outlaws, actually joining the gang for a stretch and producing a book based on his experiences. This is the source material for the film, though some of the names and dates have been tweaked and Lyon plays a very peripheral role in what's really just a frame story for the rest of the film.

The real main characters of the film are Cathy (Jodie Comer), a young woman who falls for a mean, moody, and quite pretty young biker named Benny (Austin Butler), and Benny's mentor Johnny (Tom Hardy), the founder of a bike club called the Vandals. On one level the film is a tug-of-love romantic melodrama between Cathy and Johnny for Benny's affections – his devotion to his wife often seems very secondary to his love for bombing it down the freeway while not wearing a crash helmet. But then Benny is not a very demonstrative or emotionally articulate chap, who initially shows his feelings for Cathy by sitting outside her house for ages and refusing to go away. He rejects responsibility and conventional life in favour of just riding around on his bike. Is he a true romantic American hero or just a guy with serious psychological problems? The film may unintentionally be depicting one while believing it's actually showing the other.

Interwoven with all this is something of the history of the Vandals (aka the Outlaws), which genuinely started as just a place for guys who liked motorbikes to get together and ride around, holding the occasional picnic. There's probably something quite interesting, anthropologically speaking, about motorcycle clubs as male-dominated hetero-normative spaces, and whether this is connected to the widespread unease and even social panic they were the focus of in the years after the Second World War, and the film does touch upon this. Initially the club seems rough but essentially benign, the chieftain of this group of road-warriors being Johnny, an older man who understands his responsibilities. But slowly the atmosphere around the club starts to change, as it expands and absorbs new members from different backgrounds, and Johnny grows more ruthless in protecting both its status and reputation and his own.

The frame story of the film means that most of its events feels like they are happening at a remove – it has a measured, semi-documentary quality, far away from anything designed to be conventionally thrilling. It really does feel like a winter movie more than something from the summer, and possibly a bit slow and short on action for this time of year. It actually feels a bit like one of those late-1950s exploitation films about youth culture, albeit with a bit more grit and gravitas; it certainly revels in the iconography of massed leather jackets and bikes (it emerges the club was supposedly inspired by a TV screening of The Wild One while one member ends up doing stunt advertising for Easy Rider, thereby ticking two of the major cultural boxes).

And, you know, it's mostly pretty good, helped along by strong performances from Comer and Hardy, both of whom have discovered interesting new voices to do. A new Tom Hardy voice is always cause for some excitement in our house, and while his new 'motorcycle club president' isn't quite as striking as his alien space parasite, Captain Picard, or Bane, the resulting squeaky rasp is certainly distinctive. It's really dancing along the border between full-blooded performance and outright ham, and the same is probably true of Comer, too. Even so, they're both playing identifiable characters in a way that Butler possibly isn't – Benny essentially remains a curious cipher, which is a problem given much of the film revolves around him.

In the end, though, it never quite comes to life, too broad for absolute naturalism, and too restrained to work as a piece of action melodrama. There are moments of real spiky energy, and good performances (the supporting cast includes people like Michael Shannon and Norman Reedus), but ultimately it feels like people playing an ever-so-slightly camp game of dress-up, rather than an actual drama.

Also Streaming...

...Shannon Tindle's Ultraman Rising, which despite being very obviously aimed at a family audience is one of Netflix's less egregiously or intentionally dumb films of the summer. Based on an immensely popular and well-established Japanese TV franchise with connections to the Godzilla movie series, this is the sort of thing you expect from Japanese pulp SF-fantasy – a giant chrome-plated superhero wrestling equally enormous monsters in a near-future Tokyo.

The plot concerns Ken, a new-to-the-job Ultraman struggling to juggle its demands with his career as a top baseball player (all very identifiable problems, right?). However things get worse when a battle takes an unexpected turn and leaves him as the reluctant foster parent for an enormous pink monster baby. The lessons about responsibility and selflessness which follow are not especially profound or subtle, but no doubt of value to the young target audience, while Ken's gradual reconciliation with his own father ('Ultradad') may strike a chord of genuine emotion with their parents. Striking and appealing animation, too: show your kids this and in a few years time they'll be nice and ready for Pacific Rim or Gamera: Advent of Legion.

Awix

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