The Bikeriders is about a 1960s motorcycle club that transforms over the course of roughly ten years into a criminal gang. Directed by Jeff Nichols (Loving, Mud, Midnight Special), it’s based on a 1968 book of photography by Danny Lyon. Lyon had been the photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), participating in the civil rights movement, and in a lifetime of immersing himself in movements as a photojournalist, he also covered the 2011 Occupy movement “from the inside.” But in 1963 he began documenting the lives of Chicago’s Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Lyon’s love for his fellow club/gang members is illustrated in a series of affectionate photos from his book that appear at the end as the credits roll.

The film seems to be going for the same affectionate view of the fictionalized Chicago Vandals MC, but it loses a lot of the bracing, rough-edged, often humorous quality of the photos in favor of a romantic worship of key members of the club/gang, which veers toward the ludicrous. Stars Tom Hardy and Austin Butler (the heartthrob from Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis) are particularly revered as Johnny and Benny, the most charismatic club/gang leaders whose bond drifts from vaguely father-son to sexually charged codependence.

The third corner of the central love triangle is occupied by Jodie Comer, as Kathy, the luckless woman who falls in love at first sight with absurdly handsome Benny and marries him in spite of his emotional remoteness and single-minded obsession with motorcycles. She’s the disenchanted observer who narrates in an effortful “dese, dem, and dose guys” accent a series of flashbacks about a tough but provincial bunch of working-class locals who just want to ride around experiencing the illusion of freedom but, as their biker popularity and influence expands, descend into increasingly nasty violence.