The outlaw appeal of the motorcycle gang – the machismo, the glinting chrome and the open road – has long held a seductive appeal for film-makers. Jeff Nichols’s loose, freewheeling account of the rise and fall of a fictional Chicago biker gang shares DNA with the films that came before – The Wild One and Easy Rider are namechecked – but there’s also kinship, in the revved-up posturing and Valkyrie-like shots of the gang as road warriors, with the B-movie bikesploitation flicks of the late 60s and early 70s. However, while Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter) is clearly enamoured of the closed world he depicts (the film is based on the pictures and interviews of photographer Danny Lyon, played here by Mike Faist, who rode with and documented a gang between 1963 and 1967), he also casts a critical eye over the myth of freedom and the emptiness under the grease and denim.

Key to the picture’s success is Kathy (Jodie Comer, superb, all chisel-sharp vowels and minxy charisma). The wife of Benny (a leisurely, leonine Austin Butler), the wildest, most reckless of the Vandals, she is both on the inside of this oil-smeared subculture and, as a woman, perpetually on the outside. It’s Kathy’s fate to come a distant second-best in her husband’s affections, behind the magnetic Brando wannabe leader of the pack, Johnny (Tom Hardy, excellent).

While the actual plot is a little thin, this is a thrillingly evocative piece of film-making: it’s shot in colour rather than the black and white of Lyon’s photographs but there’s a weary, beer-stained grit to it all, like leathers that have wiped out across asphalt a few too many times.

• In UK and Irish cinemas now