Just One Scene: Toby Wallace in The Bikeriders
For when you don’t want to talk about the whole movie, but you can’t stop thinking about a specific moment, character, or sequence, there’s Just One Scene.
The new Jeff Nichols film The Bikeriders is filled with famous actors (Tom Hardy doing midwestern Bane, Austin Butler just kind of doing… Austin Butler, and Jodie Comer chain smoking and being charming as hell), recognizable character actors (Michael Shannon, Boyd Holbrook (is Boyd Holbrook a character actor now? Hm), and Norman Reedus), that guys (Emory Cohen (Brooklyn, good movie), Mike Faist, and Damon Herriman). But there’s one face that jumps off the screen in a way that makes you forget that it’s completely unrecognizable.
That is the face of Toby Wallace, a British-Australian actor who I’d never seen before, but appeared about half way into The Bikeriders and made me think, “huh, who the fuck is that guy?” While he doesn’t quite possess the charisma of either of the two male leads in the movie (or maybe just isn’t offered the chance to shine quite as much), his performance as “the kid” shares some of that same “whoa” exhibited by Hardy as “Handsome Bob” in Rocknrolla (weirdly, “the kid” even kind of looks like “Handsome Bob”) and some of the same demonic allure as Butler’s “Tex” in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Gosh, remember that last scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood when Butler points a gun at Brad Pitt, who’s just smoked an acid-dipped cigarette, and asks Butler, “Are you real?” and then Butler responds with, “Real as a donut, mother fucker!” Just amazing shit. Should we all just watch that last sequence? I think we should all just watch that last sequence:
What a nasty, phantasmic, wasp’s nest of joy that is. Anyway.
Wallace plays a character in The Bikeriders who really acts as a plot device as much as anything else. He’s a street urchin who sees the Vandals (Hardy and Butler’s biker club) drive by on their motorcycles and becomes absolutely spellbound – to the point where he gets honked at for standing in the middle of the street with his gob hanging low enough for a bird to roost in. And how does “the kid” react to said honker? By busting his headlight with a wrench.
We then watch him evolve over the years as he learns to build bikes and then tries (and fails) to join the Vandals before taking matters into his own hands by taking on Hardy’s “Johnny” directly and forever pushing the club towards becoming a full-on gang. Do we know much about “the kid”? Other than being poor, coming from an abuse-ridden home, and being a full-on psychopath, not really. But in a movie where each of the three leads are so closely observed and dissected, Nichols realized he didn’t need a fourth lead. Rather he needed an instrument of terror to throw at the characters we like to put them on their asses.
Will Toby Wallace be the next Austin Butler? No, a bit too slimy. Or will he be the next Boyd Holbrook? Perhaps. All I know is his next role is in an Australian prison movie called Inside starring Guy Pierce and Cosmo Jarvis (if you watched Shogun, you know why this is such good news) and there is no place I’d rather see that face pop up next.
