One of the most romantic relationships of this summer is platonic. It’s between Austin Butler and Tom Hardy‘s characters in The Bikeriders. There’s an intense closeness between the film’s two motorcycle gang members, Benny (Butler) and Johnny (Hardy), that’s the kind of intense male intimacy expected from filmmaker Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) by this point. One scene, in particular, just screams and kicks pure romanticism.
As pictured above, Butler and Hardy are in the dark. Cinematographer Adam Stone (Midnight Special) has a golden light coming in and out between them. It’s a literal and symbolic spark in the scene between the two bikers opening up to each other with whispered, trusting tones.
The Bikeriders is a romantic film for a variety of reasons, one of which being the closeness between the film’s leads. There’s an inherent trust expressed by that physical proximity that, yes, has sexual undertones to it. The closeness during that scene wasn’t by design, at least not by Nichols. As the filmmaker explained to Immersive Media, the closeness was a choice by the only and only “darn good actor” Tom Hardy.
Here’s how that romantic scene happened in Nichols’ own reliably eloquent words:
That’s Tom, yeah. Again, it’s another example of the actors taking something that I think was good on the page and making it great and really taking it to another level. We’d never designed that scene for Tom to get that close to Austin. In fact, we very much lit it so that they would be further apart. It wasn’t until Tom started doing it. I always roll in the first take for this very reason. Tom just kept getting closer and closer, and our steadicam operator has to keep coming around. All of a sudden, this over the shoulder shot becomes a two-shot.
I’m looking at Adam, who’s dropping his head because Tom’s moving out of his light that we had spent hours creating for him back over there. Adam gets close to Tom, his face is in the dark, and we’re like, ‘Well, we’re about to miss this whole scene.’ And Tom tilts his head, and this beautiful piece of light comes across his face, and then you get the entire scene, and then you get more than the entire scene.
What you end up getting is that the physical proximity of that scene makes it sexual, and you definitely think they’re going to kiss. They don’t. But that energy is still all there, and it takes it from a quiet scene into a dangerous, sexy, kind of beautiful thing that, again, I don’t think was fully on the page.
It really does start to then bring out the notes of this thing that Tom Hardy’s character is not a father figure to this man. Tom Hardy’s character is in love with this young man, not in a sexual way, but he really wants to be him and knows that he can’t be that young man.
And so, in lieu of that, he wants to be with him. He wants him close, and he wants to give him the one thing in his life that’s most important to him, which is the club. It very clearly takes that relationship out of patriarch, out of father son territory into something much more interesting.
What is much “more interesting” is something that audiences will, without a doubt, notice when they see the scene on the big screen this weekend. There’s such an electrical and intimate energy to that scene that makes the movie reach another level of emotion. In the end, it makes the biker film more beautiful and tragic.
The Bikeriders opens in theaters June 21st.
