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.

A REAL YOUNG GIRL — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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Catherine Breillat announced her status as a feminist enfant terrible at the age of 17 with her sex-filled debut novel l’Homme facile (“A Man for the Asking”).

The French government promptly banned the book for anyone under 18. Although it might seem tame by modern standards, "A Real Young Girl" was, and is, a brave transgressive film from a fearless woman filmmaker with a singular uncompromising vision for the coming of age story she wanted to tell.

By the time she made “A Real Young Girl” Breillat (pronounced Bray-yah) had acted in Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” and Edouard Molinaro’s “Dracula and Son” opposite Christopher Lee. Such practical experiences paved the way for a filmmaker whose furious first effort would be delayed for nearly a quarter century.

“A Real Young Girl” was made in 1976, but not released until 1999 due to the “shocking” nature of the work.

Criminal.

Based on her novel “Le soupirail,” this [ostensibly] autobiographical story is set in Breillat’s hometown of Niort, France. Alice Bonnard is a physically developed 14-year-old girl visiting her mom and dad while on summer vacation from boarding school. Charlotte Alexandra (“Immoral Tales”) was 20 when she played the role of Alice, but is credible and her performance is spectacular.

“A Real Young Girl” is a brave coming-of-age reverie expressed with unbridled honesty by a canny young author fascinated with every erotic detail of the substances that discharge from her body at regular intervals.

Alice is a prolific producer of runny earwax that she smears on the family tablecloth. Sexual thoughts consume her every waking minute.

Young girls get horny, who knew?

Our unreliable young protagonist narrates the film with intimate reflections about her parents, her intolerance of other people, and about her budding, albeit messy, sexuality.

Alice’s provincially minded folks (Rita Maiden and Bruno Balp) are as flawed versions of adults as you will find anywhere in the history of film.

The movie has a raw sensibility in keeping with the natural savagery of wanton libidos in close proximity to one another. A scene in which Alice probes her vagina with a spoon while her oblivious father sits next to her at the dinner table is unsettling, to say the least.

There is reason to suspect that Alice’s father might yet molest her if he hasn’t already.

Cinematographers Pierre Fattori and Patrick Godaert share camera duties in giving the picture its deceptively unpolished appearance. Sequences screech and roar with an unbearable lustful tension. Breillat’s jarring use of soundscape is masterful.

The rebel filmmaker’s insatiable desire for intimate truths, dips into the phantasmagoric. Graphically explicit sex-fantasy sequences are at once shocking and recognizable. During once such scene, Jim, a twentysomething stud (played by Hiram Keller) tears off pieces of an earthworm that he presses inside Alice’s wet vagina. Alice will not be tamed, but she must be sated. Finding a lover who can provide birth control pills might hold the key to Alice’s sexual liberation.

Alice says things like, “Disgust makes me lucid.” She enjoys vomiting on herself in bed for its sickly smell and the warmth it provides on her ample chest. She’s a country girl in touch with the everyday brutalities of such regular tasks as killing and cleaning a chicken, something she does with her mother before imagining herself crawling around on the ground (with feathers protruding from her anus) in front of Jim, who works for Alice’s father at a nearby sawmill.

While the film could be construed as pornographic in nature, the intention of the narrative function is clearly to examine the psyche and sexuality of a young girl within the political and social context of Niort, France circa 1963. A television newscast reports General de Gaulle’s dissolution of parliament. A local shopkeeper (played by Shirley Stoler) is none too pleased about Alice’s tempting ways and lets Alice’s mother know it.

Breillat’s magically real tale of sexual adventure owes a debit to Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and to J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” The character of Alice is after all a female archetype born of the same hunger for individuality and sexual expression as the teenage male protagonists of Roth and Salinger. “A Real Young Girl” retains a fresh sense of transgressing taboos. The melodramatic flourish that Breillat uses to end the story gives a knowing wink to say that this filmmaker knows exactly what she’s doing. Bravo.

Not Rated. 90 mins.

DARK STAR: H.R. GIGER'S WORLD

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SMART NEW MEDIA PRESENTS

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H.R. Giger (pronounced ghee-gur) was a true artistic genius of the 20th and 21st centuries. His innately original “biomechanical” visual style contributed to the “Alien” sci-fi movie franchise that director Ridley Scott launched in 1979.

Giger’s gothic reptilian alien monster designs for the film exemplify the morbid nightmare-inducing quality of his monochromatic art. Birth, death, and sex have never enjoyed a more modern gothic celebration of evil erotic necromantic possibilities of psychosexual designs. BDSM and satanic imagery also plays a part in Giger’s flesh-meets-metal designs.

Giger won a Best Achievement in Visual Effects Oscar for his work on “Alien,” but by the time Hollywood discovered his prolific wealth of paintings and sculptures, the surrealist was already a household name in his hometown of Chur, Switzerland. Giger’s work on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abandoned “Dune” movie informed design aspects of “Star Wars.”

Debut documentary-feature director Belinda Sallin was fortunate to film Hans Ruedi (as his friends and family affectionately call him) at his sprawling live/work studio during the artist’s final days. He passed away shortly after filming was completed.

It takes some getting used to seeing the master artist barely able to speak or move freely after suffering from an apparent stroke. Archive footage of Giger painting shows him working with phenomenal speed and precision.

Sallin extracts fascinating stories depicting Hans Ruedi growing up in his loving parents’ home, which came equipped with a genuine mummy occupying the basement. Racked with fear due to the ancient preserved corpse occupying his home, Hans Ruedi was nonetheless compelled to visit the basement alone at the age of eight to face his fears. Old footage reveals the mummified cadaver in its coffin-like case. The creepy experience stuck with Giger and contributed to his anxious psyche. Like his encouraging mother, Hans Ruedi was constantly racked with fears related to the unknown. Painting and sculpting were the only way to alleviate his angst.

Surprises abound. Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof takes the viewer on a backyard tour of Giger’s “Ghost Ride,” a creepy adult rollercoaster that takes the passenger on a perinatal journey through tunnels adorned with the faces of sculpted infants, reptilian creatures, and skulls.

Giger’s three-dimensional reflection of the “trauma of birth” is far scarier than anything in a circus sideshow. A dynamic aerial view rises from the tree-and-shrub concealed area to reveal its proximity on the edge of town, adjacent to an active railway and mini skyscrapers. An especially joyous moment arrives when the camera follows Hans Ruedi taking the ride. He yells at his beloved Siamese cat Muggi to get off the track.

Giger’s dark sense of humor comes across when he takes the oldest skull from his collection off a shelf, and describes how, after his father gave it to him when he was six years old, he would pull it down the street on a piece of string. The unpleasantness of death gives him, and us, a fuzzy feeling. Delightful.

"Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World” provides an intimate window into the creative process and vibrant workplace of an artist whose originality and boundless imagination is beyond the beyond.

Not Rated. 95 mins.