‘The Bikeriders’ True Story: What to Know About the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club that Inspired the Movie

The Bikeriders is now streaming on Peacock, free to anyone with a Peacock Premium subscription, which means soon even more people will get to witness Austin Butler’s magnetic chemistry with co-star Tom Hardy. It’s not gay, but it’s also not not gay, you know?

Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, The Bikeriders is loosely based on the true story of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Jodie Comer stars as a midwestern, ’60s woman named Kathy, who speaks to a reporter about her love affair with the roguish bad boy, Benny Cross (Butler), a member of the fictional, Chicago-based Vandals Motorcycle Club, led by Johnny (Hardy).

Though many of the plot details were invented for the film, many of the characters are based on real-life counterparts, who were documented by photojournalist Danny Lyon (played by Mike Faist in the movie) in his 1968 photo-book, The Bikeriders. In fact, before you’re tempted to poke fun at Comer’s decidedly-not-Midwest accent in the film, you should know it was, in fact, a spot-on impression of the real-life Kathy Bauer.

Jodie Comer IS Kathy Bauer.#TheBikeriders pic.twitter.com/nXq7r6rPVS

— SwantjeS (@Swantjeki) July 4, 2024

Here’s a look at the real-life Outlaws Motorcycle Club that inspired The Bikeriders.

Is The Bikeriders based on a true story?

The Bikeriders is based on the true story of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, although the name of the club was changed to the Vandals Motorcycle Club in the movie. The real Outlaws Motorcycle Club was founded in the Chicago suburb of McCook, Illinois by Electro-Motive Company employees in 1935—making it much older than the club depicted in the movie. The Bikeriders movie opted to focus on the Chicago-based club in the ’60s, because the script was adapted from photojournalist Danny Lyon’s 1968 photo-book of the same name. (That same book also inspired the 1969 film, Easy Rider.)

According to a 2014 Chicago Reader profile, Lyon began photographing the club in 1963, joined the gang on the road for four years, and was a “full-fledged” member of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club between 1965 and 1966. Jodie Comer’s character, Kathy, is based on Kathy Bauer, who was one of many people that Lyon interviewed for his book. Writer/director Jeff Nichols decided to make her his protagonist.

Lyon gave actor Jodie Comer 30 minutes of audio recordings of his chats with Bauer, which you can listen to online. In one of her interviews, Bauer describes first meeting “the guys” at a bar, including her first impression of a “half-naked” man named Corky (played by Karl Glusman in the movie), and the first time she saw the “good-looking blonde” that she would soon marry, Benny (played by Butler). She describes being hit on by Benny, leaving the bar, and then being grabbed and forced on the back of Benny’s bike by the other Outlaws.

“So he takes off, he goes through the stoplights and everything so that I wouldn’t jump off—and I wouldn’t have jumped off anyway, because I was scared shitless, I’d never been on a motorcycle in all my life,” Bauer tells Lyon on the tape. Despite the fact that this sounds like a literal kidnapping, Bauer recalls being charmed by Benny’s tendency to check to make sure she hadn’t fallen off the bike.

Then Bauer describes meeting Johnny [Goodpaster], the basis for Tom Hardy’s character in the film. “Johnny was real nice to me,” she says. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m the president of this club, and I won’t let nothing happen to you.'”

That night, Bauer says, Benny took her home and dropped off in front of her then-boyfriend, who was sitting on the front porch. After refusing Benny’s many calls to see her again, Bauer recalls, “Finally, one night he planted himself there all night. He wouldn’t go home. My boyfriend would come over, and Benny was still sitting. I’d tell him, ‘You’d better go.’ He wouldn’t go! Finally, my boyfriend left and Benny was still around.” Bauer agreed to go to an Outlaws meeting with Benny, and “five weeks later, I married him.”

We see the above scene play out almost verbatim in the movie, from the way Comer’s Kathy describes it to Faist’s Lyon, to the way Butler’s Benny stakes out Kathy’s apartment. Other lines that you hear in the film are also pulled word-for-word from Lyon’s audio files, including a man called Cockroach (played by Emory Cohen, although this line was given to Norman Reedus as Funny Sonny in the movie) insisting that eating bugs is the same thing as eating a rare steak; and a man named Zipco (played by Michael Shannon) explaining that his brother is a “pinko,” aka clean-cut and college-educated.

However, many other details were changed for the film. Kathy, for example, was a mother of four, but has no kids in the movie. Faist’s version of Lyons isn’t seen often riding with the guys, as he did in real life. As far as I can tell, the antagonist of the movie, The Kid (played by Toby Wallace), is not based on a real person. And while it’s true that group expanded nationwide and did have a documented rivalry between the “beer drinkers” and “pot smokers” of the club, the plot line of the group starting out as an edgy club that descended into a violent gang—despite the efforts of Tom Hardy—seems to have been largely made-up. That’s likely why Nicholas opted to change the name of the club in his movie to “the Vandals.”

So there you have it! Even though the characters in The Bikeriders were inspired by interviews with real-life people, the plot itself was invented. That’s Hollywood for ya.