THE BIKERIDERS

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Writer/director Jeff Nichols based this wildly entertaining fact-based movie on photographer Danny Lyon's book, which celebrated the Illinois' Outlaws Motorcycle Club.

Through a fictionalized narrative, "The Bikeriders" makes profound commentary on subjects regarding toxic masculinity, cult mentality, and the role of women amid man's animalistic urges.

Nichols's beautifully formal approach is stunning to look at, and to digest on intellectual and emotional levels.

The Viet Nam War is a constant presence lurking in the film's subtext.

Inspired by a television airing of Marlon Brando's "The Wild One" (1953), truck driver family-man Johnny (Tom Hardy) starts his own motorcycle club, the Vandals.

Johnny goes so far as to adopt Brando's voice and speech patterns. Johnny's whole communal club is based on artifice.

What could go wrong with such a phony foundation for positive social interaction to occur? Add to that a repressed homosexual underpinning, and you've got problems.

In the words of Iggy Pop, "a heavy price for a heavy pose."

Iggy's "Stooges" era song "Down on the Street" makes narrative impact during one of the film's most harrowing sequences.

Real life is hardly as romantic as Hollywood would have you believe.

Johnny bites off more than he can chew as his Vandals Motorcycle Club grows rapidly with multiple chapters around the Midwest.

A hotbed of cult violence breeds like wildfire. Stupid is as stupid does.

Tom Hardy's Johnny hopes to pass his presidential club status on to Benny (Austin Butler), a young hothead adored by Jodie Comer's working class Kathy Bauer character.

It doesn't take much extrapolation to see the connection between motorcycle gangs and pseudo political cults such as the MAGA movement. Racism and sexism are baked into the mindsets of societal outcasts intent of instilling fear in all those they come across.

Primary to Jeff Nichols's brilliant five-act film is the female perspective of its protagonist Kathy.

Jodie Comer gives an Oscar-worthy performance that defies all expectatio

Ms. Comer's mastery of acting craft is astounding — next level stuff. Comer's Midwest exquisite Midwest accent and range of expressive physicalizations are a delight to witness. Wow!

All young aspiring actors should study Jody Comer's superb work.

Tom Hardy and Austin Butler have their hands full keeping up with Jodie Comer.

"The Bikeriders" is an actor's actors movie by far and away.

Rated R. 114 mins.

BRATS

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

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Andrew McCarthy crafts an exquisitely satisfying base-touching expedition with his Generation Jones comrades, whose careers suffered as a result of a New York Magazine article, written by David Blum. The article was published on June 10, 1985.

Generation Jones got fucked, once again.

Jealousy plays a hand in the situation. Roughly seven years senior to the actors he wrote disparagingly about in his article, David Blum clearly had a personal agenda to take down a peg the six actors whose success he resented.

For the record, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Andrew McCarthy are the actors considered to populate Blum's fictional club of actors assembled by auteur filmmaker John Hughes and Joel Schumacher.

For his part, John Hughes was deeply invested in telling truthful coming-of-age stories for the time. For Schumacher, it was a lark.

Related movies to watch are: Joel Schumacher's "St. Elmo's Fire," John Hughes's "Pretty In Pink," "16 Candles," and "The Breakfast Club."

If you haven't yet seen "The Breakfast Club," you're in for a rare treat.

It ain't pretty when Andrew McCarthy interviews David Blum in Blum's NYC apartment. Unwilling to take one iota of blame for his mean-spirited attack on a group of young actors trying to succeed in the business, David Blum comes across as something less appealing than, well, pond scum.

Nevermind that Blum's editor at New York Magazine also shares blame for not doing his or her job on the "Brat Pack" hit piece. Just because something sounds like a clever play on words, does not make it suitable.

Editorial oversight, people.

David Blum's insincerity eviscerated the sincerity of young actors who deserved to be treated much better.  

I'm personally familiar with New York Magazine's proclivity for hatchet jobs.

NY Mag's "Vulture" site (how apropos) writer Hunter Harris took her best shot at me over my review of "Lady Bird." Sadly, Ms. Harris did not have the sand to address my revisited review of "Lady Bird," where I did a deep dive on Greta Gerwig's attempt to normalize unethical behavior.

Evidently, such truth was beyond he scope of Ms. Harris's "investigation."

The media is not your friend — never was, never will be.

That the OG Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop), were a bunch of wealthy show biz veterans, as opposed to a generation of young actors trying to make it, got lost in the social consciousness of the day.

One of this film's rich theme lines comes from Time Magazine's film critic Richard Schickel, speaking on stage for The Phil Donahue television show with Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, and Judd Nelson seated beside him.

"Can I apologize for my profession for that? I really thought that was a scurrilous article."

Andrew McCarthy is eight months older than me.

I had the good fortune of having this group of actors as generational touchstones to keep track of shifts in American society.

I'll never forget walking out of the cinema at the end of "The Breakfast Club" during its opening run. Here was a modern-day "400 Blows," except now we had an oddball mix of young individuals dealing directly with self-identity in the Regan era.

Dig the new breed.

So it is that I come to "Brats" with more than an ounce of "Blank Generation" ideology at hand, "I can take it or leave it each time."

Richard Hell wrote that line.

Richard Hell (of NYC's Voidoids punk band) could easily have played opposite Emilio Estevez in "Repo Man," Alex Cox's ode to L.A.'s '80s era youth culture.

There are many life lessons to be learned from this very polished documentary about a generation of actors who didn't have the proper tools at the time to deal with a cloaked attack from the media. If only the right publicist had stepped in to make lemonade from lemons.

Gen J lives!

Not Rated. 92 mins.

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

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Alexander Mackendrick (director of “The Ladykillers”) may have been of British descent, but his quick-paced 1957 sardonic drama — about the symbiotic relationship between a decadent Manhattan newspaper showbiz columnist and a hungry press agent — captures America’s indulgence in greed, corruption, and aggression like none other. Drawing on the noir style and subject matter of Billy Wilder’s perfect “Ace in the Hole” (1952) “black political drama” would be a suitable moniker for the dark pitch of cynical social satire that “Sweet Smell of Success” examines, rather than the “film noir” attribution that it frequently attracts. Here lies the defective foundation of the American Dream as viewed from an American viewpoint (Burt Lancaster’s company produced the film).

The story takes place during a day and a half in the life of its New York City characters. Fey toady press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is in the doghouse with his Walter Winchell-type gossip columnist mentor-and-abuser JJ Hunsecker (emphasis on the second “J”). Mackendrick’s ravenous camera moves through Manhattan’s late '50s Broadway theater district on a nocturnal quest for truth.

According to JJ, the frequently groveling Sidney is not responding quickly enough to JJ’s orders to rev up the rumor mill to break up a hot romance brewing between Hunsecker’s adult sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and a bland jazz guitarist named Steve Dallas (Martin Milner). Steve Dallas isn’t exactly the next Tal Farlow on guitar, but he’s earned Susan’s romantic devotion. JJ wants to shut the whole thing down with a smear-job on Steve Dallas that sticks. “Communist” is a convenient accusation. JJ’s incestuous emotions seethe in his sexually impotent [or bound] mind. Sidney is working through an imagined apprenticeship with JJ that he hopes will eventually lead to his mentor’s place. The latent homosexual dominant/submissive subtext that exists between the two men underscores JJ’s impotent but nonetheless incestuous desires for his sister. Trouble in mind; trouble in action.

Neither man has an ounce of ethics but both fake morals to mask their true devotion — to power and money. Sidney calls everybody “baby” or “sweetheart” to get what he wants for his master. He sees though JJ regardless of how beholden to him he is. Sidney tells his de facto boss, “JJ, you’ve got such contempt for people it makes you stupid.”

Based on a novella by former press agent Ernest Lehman (“Sabrina”) and adapted by Clifford Odets, the great leftist poet of Harold Clurman Group Theatre — “Sweet Smell of Success” exists in a self-loathing urban bourgeois stratosphere where a gossip columnist like JJ Hunsecker can make or break a career depending on whether or not he mentioned it in his column.

Burt Lancaster’s JJ Hunsecker is a nasty master manipulator, but he doesn’t know his limits — and he doesn’t care because he’s been rewarded so much and so long for his ruthless tactics. He’s irresponsible. JJ’s capacious power has blinded everyone, including him. Still, his days are numbered.

Neither the antagonist (JJ) nor the film’s (purposefully) falsely represented protagonist (Sidney) has any redeeming traits. They suffer ongoing degrees of retribution, but each will carry on in the prescribed despicable methods to which each is accustomed.

“ColeSmithey.com” flopped at the box office. It is in Time Magazine’s list as one of the top movies of all time.

Not Rated. 96 mins.