It was announced in August 2022 that Nichols would also direct the film, with Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, and Tom Hardy being cast. [3] Michael Shannon, Boyd Holbrook, and Damon Herriman were added to the cast later in the month. [7] That September, Toby Wallace, Emory Cohen, Beau Knapp, Karl Glusman, and Happy Anderson joined the ensemble cast. [8] Norman Reedus and Mike Faist were added to the cast the following month. [9] [10] a b Seymour, Tom (2 October 2016). "Major Danny Lyon retrospective comes to London". British Journal of Photography. Apptitude Media . Retrieved 12 January 2017. Anthony D'Alessandro (November 21, 2023). "New Regency's 'The Bikeriders' Looking For A New Home". Deadline. But Benny is deeply in love with Kathy, played by Jodie Comer with tough pugnacity and an outrageous northwestern accent with which you could slice a chrome tailpipe in two. She is effectively the narrator, speaking to Danny Lyon himself, played by Mike Faust. Like Lorraine Bracco’s Karen in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Kathy is a respectable working-class woman who never intended to get drawn into this world, but found Benny very attractive just as he was beguiled by her cool, sceptical confidence. It is Kathy who can see the ritual absurdity of the Vandals’ codes of masculinity – how, having affected to despise rules, they set up a club with a huge amount of rules, followed with pedantic solemnity like a cross between the army and the Rotary club. She can see how her Benny is going to die one day in the service of this crazy group, and so a duel for possession begins between her and Johnny. The charismatic performances of the cast are undoubtedly key to The Bikeriders' charm, particularly Comer's fast-talking reluctant romantic and Hardy as a beleaguered boss realizing he can't keep up with a changing world. Newcomer Toby Wallace (who also makes an impression in Kitty Green's The Royal Hotel) is well-cast as a chillingly determined wannabe, while a well-timed cameo from Norman Reedus as zonked-out Californian biker Funny Sonny is delightful. If there's one complaint to be made about the ensemble, it's that there's simply not enough Michael Shannon screentime.

D'Alessandro, Anthony (July 28, 2023). "Disney Dates 20th Century Studios' Jeff Nichols Pic 'The Bikeriders' For December". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved July 28, 2023.Unlike the heroes of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider – a film which is to provide employment for one of the group – the bikeriders have no end or quest in view. They just drift around, assemble for “picnics” in green spaces they churn into mud during races and get into fights with other gangs with whom they later cordially have beers. A lot of their time is spent almost catatonically hanging out at a bar in which there is a big discussion about the costs involved in installing a phone behind the bar which their membership subs would entitle them to use on club business. Lyon befriended many of the prisoners. The book also includes texts taken from prison records, letters from convicts, and inmate artwork. In particular, the book focuses on the case of Billy McCune, a convicted rapist whose death sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison. In the foreword, Lyon describes McCune as a diagnosed psychotic, who one evening, while awaiting execution, "cut his penis off to the root and, placing it in a cup, passed it between the bars to the guard." Kroll, Justin (August 17, 2022). "Michael Shannon, Boyd Holbrook and Damon Herriman Latest To Join Jeff Nichols The Bikeriders At New Regency". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved August 17, 2022.

FROM EARLY ON, Lyon had not only harnessed but excelled at photographic composition, and the imprecise skill of capturing a compelling picture. This feat is all the more impressive since Lyon was really self-taught in photography, without models or mentors. At the University of Chicago (where he was a classmate of Bernie Sanders’s), Lyon majored in history and studied documentary photographs of the Civil War; he also admired the work of James Agee and Walker Evans, especially their first-person documentary account of living among Southern tenant farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). In 1962, even before he had graduated, Lyon traveled to Albany, Georgia, to photograph civil rights demonstrations. At age twenty-one, he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); worked the front lines with activists Julian Bond, John Lewis, and Howard Zinn; and was jailed alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Lyon’s extraordinary civil rights images show the courage and integrity that became the hallmarks of his early work, as he waded into tense encounters with burly Southern cops and angry Mississippi mobs. He is the founding member of the publishing group Bleak Beauty. He was greatly encouraged in his photography by curator of the Art Institute of Chicago [6] Hugh Edwards, who gave Lyon two solo exhibits as a young man. Conversations with the Dead (1971) was published with full cooperation of the Texas Department of Corrections. Lyon photographed in six prisons over a 14-month period in 1967–68. The series was printed in book form in 1971 by Holt publishing. The introduction points to a statement of purpose that the penal system of Texas is symbolic for incarceration everywhere. He states, "I tried with whatever power I had to make a picture of imprisonment as distressing as I knew it to be in reality."All of Lyon's publications work in the style of photographic New Journalism, [4] meaning that the photographer has become immersed in, and is a participant of, the documented subject. He is the founding member of the publishing group Bleak Beauty.

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. The Lyndhurst Series on the South. Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; University of North Carolina, 1992. ISBN 9780807820544. Edited by Alex Harris. O'Hagan, Sean (20 April 2014). "Danny Lyon's inside shots". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 4 November 2015. Photography is not merely [Lyon's] occupation or livelihood. This medium and his life are inextricably linked, and he reveals this plainly through a seamless weaving of the personal and professional... A lovely informality results from this combination of elements, as if we are rummaging unfettered through his studio."— photo-eye But these later works also reveal the radical humanism of Lyon’s practice, which depends not only on immersive engagement but also on an ethical person-to-person commitment to specific individuals and their needs and interests. The Whitney exhibition includes a roughly four-by-nine-foot bulletin board from Lyon’s upstate New York studio, incorporating photographs, negatives, postcards, gallery announcements, and personal letters—an accumulation from two decades, 1985 to 2005. This remarkable collage, as definitively as any of his photographs or books or films, shows Lyon remaking the image of himself as a series of fragments, a sequence of pictures whose symbolism is at once public and private, broadly legible and narrowly subaltern. Intensely political, he portrays his own selfhood not with certainty, but as he has always depicted his outlaw others: as provisional, unstable, continually becoming. More than just another monograph or retrospective photo book... A remarkably raw and compelling journey."— Faded and Blurred

Nichols creates a wide tapestry with The Bikeriders, drawing upon midwestern nostalgia and crafting characters from photographs and song lyrics, but this is both its strength and its downfall as the emotional heart of the story gets lost amongst all its formal choices. Three boys and 'A Train' graffiti in Brooklyn's Lynch Park in New York City." By Danny Lyon, Brooklyn, NY, July 1974