Peter Fonda’s chopper crests a ridge in Monument Valley. No dialogue. No plot. Just two wheels, red desert, and Steppenwolf hammering through a tinny speaker somewhere off-camera. That one shot from Easy Rider did more to shape how the world sees motorcycles than every Harley-Davidson ad campaign combined.
We have been arguing about biker movies in the shop for years. Every rider has a list. Every list is wrong - except theirs. So rather than rank these films in some definitive order that nobody will agree with anyway, we grouped them by the decade that produced them. Seven eras of motorcycle cinema, the real iron that showed up on screen, and honest calls on which ones hold up and which ones just looked good on a VHS cover.
This is one piece of a bigger picture. For how films, clubs, and riding culture all connect, our motorcycle culture guide lays out the full map.
The 1950s: Brando Starts Something He Cannot Stop
The Wild One (1953)
Director: Laszlo Benedek. Stars: Marlon Brando, Lee Marvin.
Ground zero for every outlaw biker image that followed. Brando plays Johnny Strabler, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, rolling into a small California town and unsettling everyone in it. His answer when asked what he is rebelling against - “Whaddya got?” - became a bumper sticker, a tattoo, and eventually a cliche. But in 1953, nobody had said it yet.
Here is the irony that never gets old: Brando rode a 1950 Triumph Thunderbird 6T. The film that launched American outlaw biker culture put its star on a British bike. Lee Marvin, playing the rival gang leader, rode the Harley-Davidson. That British-versus-American tension ran through motorcycling for the next two decades.
The British Board of Film Censors banned The Wild One until 1968. They thought it would inspire copycats. Based on the next seventy years of motorcycle culture, they were not wrong.
Motorcycle Gang (1957)
Director: Edward L. Cahn.
Not a good movie. But it established the exploitation-film formula that dozens of biker B-movies copied: outsider infiltrates a gang, falls for a woman, chaos in the third act. You can trace a straight line from this script template through every outlaw MC drama up to and including Sons of Anarchy.
The 1960s: Drive-Ins, Counterculture, and the Birth of the Chopper Film
The sixties cranked out more biker films than any other decade. Most were cheap drive-in exploitation pictures shot in two weeks. Three of them changed everything.
The Great Escape (1963)
Director: John Sturges. Stars: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough.
Not technically a biker movie, but it contains the most famous motorcycle scene ever filmed. McQueen’s Captain Hilts tries to clear a barbed-wire fence on a stolen German motorcycle while escaping a POW camp. The jump was performed by McQueen’s friend and stunt double Bud Ekins on a 1961 Triumph TR6 Trophy disguised as a German military BMW.
McQueen was a genuine racer who competed in desert events and the International Six Days Trial. The footage where it is actually him on the bike - and there is a lot of it - shows legitimate skill, not actor-on-a-prop riding.
We have talked to riders who point to this exact film as the reason they bought their first bike. McQueen did not just ride motorcycles. He made riding look like the only reasonable thing a person could do with their life.
The Wild Angels (1966)
Director: Roger Corman. Stars: Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern.
Corman’s cheap, fast exploitation picture was loosely based on real Hells Angels events. It grossed over $10 million against a $360,000 budget, proving biker movies printed money. The Hells Angels cooperated with production and provided extras and motorcycles. Many bikes on screen are genuine club members’ panheads and shovelheads in various states of customization.
Fonda’s performance here led directly to Easy Rider three years later.
Easy Rider (1969)
Director: Dennis Hopper. Stars: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson.
This is the one. Fonda plays Wyatt, Hopper plays Billy. They ride from LA to New Orleans after a cocaine deal, searching for something the film never quite names. Jack Nicholson got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor as an alcoholic small-town lawyer who steals every scene he occupies.
The bikes are the real stars. Fonda’s “Captain America” chopper - built by Ben Hardy and Cliff Vaughs - had a raked-out springer front end, a stars-and-stripes tank, and a chromed hardtail frame. Four bikes were built total, two per rider. Most were destroyed during production or stolen afterward. A bike claimed to be an original sold at auction in 2014 under disputed authenticity.
Easy Rider cost roughly $400,000 and grossed over $60 million worldwide. It earned two Oscar nominations and helped ignite the New Hollywood era alongside Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate.
Honest take from our crew: Easy Rider works better as a cultural monument than as a film. The pacing sags in the middle, the Mardi Gras acid sequence has aged poorly, and the ending mistakes nihilism for profundity. None of that matters. Those two choppers rolling down a two-lane highway are seared into the American psyche permanently.
The 1970s: The Real Thing on Film
On Any Sunday (1971)
Director: Bruce Brown. Stars: Steve McQueen, Mert Lawwill, Malcolm Smith.
Bruce Brown - the man behind the surfing documentary The Endless Summer - pointed his camera at motorcycles and made the greatest moto documentary ever. No argument. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature and is credited with spiking motorcycle sales across the US in the early seventies.
It covers flat-track, motocross, desert racing, trials, and road racing. McQueen appears throughout as a real participant, not a celebrity cameo. Grand National Champion Mert Lawwill and desert legend Malcolm Smith are the other two leads.
What makes On Any Sunday different from every biker film before it: zero outlaw mythology. No gangs, no leather-clad antiheroes, no rebellion. Just people who love motorcycles, doing the thing they love. The closing sequence - McQueen, Lawwill, and Smith riding dirt bikes on the beach - is pure, unfiltered joy on two wheels.
Electra Glide in Blue (1973)
Director: James William Guercio. Stars: Robert Blake.
An underrated slow-burn. Blake plays a short, ambitious motorcycle cop in the Arizona desert who wants to make detective. He rides - naturally - a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide, the standard police bike of that era. The film uses the desert landscape the way a western would, and the riding footage is some of the best committed to film in the 1970s.
Go in expecting a mood piece, not an action film, and you will be rewarded.
The 1980s-1990s: Stunts, Excess, and the Harley Revival
Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior (1981)
Director: George Miller. Stars: Mel Gibson.
The original Mad Max is a biker film at its core. Max is a motorcycle cop in a disintegrating Australian society, and the villains are a gang led by the Toecutter. The police ride modified Kawasaki KZ1000s. The gang rides a mix of Kawasakis and Hondas.
The Road Warrior shifts toward cars, but the biker gang element stays. The stunt work across both films is genuinely dangerous - multiple stunt performers were seriously injured - and that gives every riding sequence a raw, visceral weight that CGI has never matched.
If you ride in our Bobber Brothers tees, you already know the look: stripped down, no apologies. These films nailed that energy before anyone called it an aesthetic.
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991)
Director: Simon Wincer. Stars: Mickey Rourke, Don Johnson.
Objectively a bad movie. Rourke plays a biker, Johnson plays a cowboy, and together they rob a bank to save their favorite bar. The plot is nonsense.
But Rourke rides a blacked-out Harley-Davidson FXR with an S&S 98ci stroker, and he rides it like someone who actually knows how to handle a motorcycle - because he does. The FXR is one of the most underrated frames Harley ever built, and this film gave it its moment in the spotlight. We have worked on a few FXRs, and every owner eventually mentions this movie. That is its entire legacy, and it is enough.
The 2000s: CGI Shows Up, Authenticity Fights Back
Biker Boyz (2003)
Director: Reggie Rock Bythewood. Stars: Laurence Fishburne, Derek Luke, Kid Rock.
Based on real underground sport bike racing culture in Southern California, Biker Boyz was the first major studio film to center Black motorcycle culture. The bikes are Japanese - Hayabusas, Ninjas, R1s - and the riding mixes practical stunts with early-2000s CGI. Not a critical hit, but it brought visibility to a part of motorcycle culture that Hollywood had spent fifty years ignoring.
The World’s Fastest Indian (2005)
Director: Roger Donaldson. Stars: Anthony Hopkins.
Hopkins plays Burt Munro, a New Zealander who spent decades modifying a 1920 Indian Scout in his shed, then hauled it to the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1967 and set a land speed record that still stands in its class. His official two-way average record of 184.087 mph still stands, and he hit 190.07 mph on a one-way qualifying run.
This is the most inspiring motorcycle film ever made. Munro’s story is entirely real. He cast his own pistons, built his own flywheels, and streamlined the body himself. By the time he was finished, the only thing his bike shared with a stock 1920 Scout was the name. It was a completely hand-built machine wearing an Indian’s identity. Hopkins is perfect in the role.
Builder stories like Munro’s are rare. The closest modern parallel might be the ARCH Motorcycle story - another case of obsessive craftsmanship pushing a machine far beyond its original limits.
The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)
Director: Derek Cianfrance. Stars: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes.
Gosling plays Luke, a motorcycle stunt rider who robs banks to support his family. The first act is built around his riding - and he performed many of his own stunts on a stripped-down Honda CBR through the streets of Schenectady, New York. The opening sequence, a single unbroken shot following Gosling from a carnival trailer into a motorcycle stunt inside a metal globe, is one of the best film openings of the 2010s.
Not a chopper, not a cruiser. But the raw skill on display carries the same energy as any outlaw film in this list.
The 2020s: Full Circle
The Bikeriders (2023)
Director: Jeff Nichols. Stars: Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer, Michael Shannon.
Based on Danny Lyon’s 1968 photo book, The Bikeriders follows a fictional Chicago motorcycle club from its mid-1960s founding through its 1970s transformation. Tom Hardy plays the founder, inspired by the Outlaws MC. Austin Butler plays a quiet, magnetic member whose loyalty to the club collides with his marriage.
The period detail is meticulous. The bikes are era-correct Harleys - Panheads and Shovelheads - and the riding footage is practical, not CGI. The film does not glamorize club life and it does not demonize it. It just shows it: the brotherhood, the freedom, the cost.
Honest take from our crew: this is the best fictional portrayal of motorcycle club culture ever put on screen. If you care about MC culture, this is required viewing. For more on the real clubs that inspired it, our guide to famous biker gangs covers the major organizations.
Honorable Mentions
A few more worth throwing on the screen:
- Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) - Jack Nicholson before Easy Rider, riding with actual Hells Angels members.
- Stone (1974) - Australian biker film that predates Mad Max. Cult classic in Oceania.
- Torque (2004) - Absurd, over-the-top, and fully aware of it. Think Fast and Furious on two wheels.
- Why We Ride (2013) - Documentary in the On Any Sunday tradition. Interviews riders across every discipline about what keeps them coming back.
- Long Way Round (2004) and Long Way Down (2007) - Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman circumnavigate the globe on BMW R1150GS Adventures. Technically TV series, but the extended cuts run like films.
What Separates the Great Ones
After burning through decades of these films, a pattern shows up. The motorcycle movies that last share three things.
Real riding. Practical stunts, real motorcycles, actual danger. McQueen in The Great Escape. Gosling in The Place Beyond the Pines. The stunt riders bleeding on the set of Mad Max. The moment a film switches to CGI bikes, the audience disconnects - even if they cannot explain why.
Bikes as characters. In the great motorcycle films, the machine is not a prop. Captain America’s chopper is as iconic as Fonda himself. Munro’s Indian Scout is the emotional center of The World’s Fastest Indian. When the bike matters to the story, the film matters to riders.
Respect for the culture. The Wild One created a stereotype. Easy Rider complicated it. On Any Sunday bypassed it entirely. The Bikeriders finally showed the full picture. The films that endure are the ones that treat motorcycle culture as something lived, not something to exploit for a quick box-office return.
Every rider has a film that got them on two wheels - or at least made them twist the throttle a little harder the next morning. For some of us, it was McQueen clearing that fence. For others, it was Fonda’s chopper silhouetted against the desert. For the younger generation, maybe it was Gosling robbing banks on a stripped Honda.
Whatever it was, it proves what Hollywood figured out seventy years ago and still has not gotten tired of: there is nothing on screen quite like a motorcycle.
For more two-wheeled entertainment, our companion piece on the best motorcycle TV shows covers everything from Sons of Anarchy to Ride with Norman Reedus. And if the Ghost Rider films are more your speed, we broke down every bike from the comics and the Cage movies.
Sources
- The Wild One (1953) - IMDb page for the Brando film that launched the outlaw biker genre
- Easy Rider (1969) - IMDb page with cast, box office data, and Academy Award nominations
- On Any Sunday (1971) - IMDb page for Bruce Brown’s documentary featuring Steve McQueen
- NPR - Behind the Motorcycles in Easy Rider - the real story of builders Cliff Vaughs and Ben Hardy
- BFI - 10 Great Biker Films - British Film Institute’s curated list with historical context
- Indian Motorcycle - Burt Munro - official page on Munro’s 184.087 mph land speed record
- The Bikeriders (2023) - IMDb page for Jeff Nichols’ film based on Danny Lyon’s photo book
- Lyon, Danny. The Bikeriders. Chronicle Books, 1968 (reprint 2003) - the photo book that inspired the 2023 film
