At the junket for Jeff Nichols’ new drama The Bikeriders, hosted at The Bike Shed in Los Angeles, I get to ride on the back of a Harley through the streets of downtown L.A. and over the Sixth Street Bridge. With a professional driver doing all the actual work, I’m able to enjoy the air hitting my face, the way we’re able to move easily through traffic, unencumbered by the bulk of an automobile. It feels like… freedom.

“I’m sure every single article about motorcycles ever in the history of the world has the word freedom in it, but it’s true,” Norman Reedus tells me, the day after my ride. “It’s like you’re in your own little world and flying through the sky — and you can feel it.”

But for Tom Hardy, the question of whether motorcycles mean freedom isn’t as easy to answer. “I think anything that allows you choice gives you a certain element of freedom,” he says. “So do motorcycles mean freedom? I think they’re symbolic in some aspect of that. But they’re also a responsibility, and there’s a distinct lack of freedom [in being] responsible. You have to be extremely responsible on a vehicle like a motorbike — especially if you want to live.”

That dichotomy between the freedom of motorcycles and their real dangers is a big part of The Bikeriders, which Nichols was inspired to write and direct after coming across the book of the same name. In Danny Lyon’s photographs and interviews with the members of motorcycle gangs of the 1960s, Nichols found “a full portrait of this subculture. And so, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, he gave me everything I needed to show the breadth of the human beings involved in this very particular outsider group.”

The Bikeriders begins in the 1960s, as a group of motorcycle enthusiasts, led by Johnny (Hardy), form the Vandals MC — a group which begins initially as a way for men to find a sense of community, before darker forces transform the gang into a more violent operation. Caught up in the Vandals are younger member Benny (Austin Butler) and his wife Kathy (Jodie Comer), whose relationship is complicated by Johnny’s hold on Benny — and Benny’s own passion for riding.

“All my films have had to do with masculinity, usually father-son relationships, ’cause that’s kind of what I’m in the middle of. But this film seemed to tackle it on a broader spectrum, definitely a more American spectrum, the idea of masculinity in all of its prose and all of its cons,” Nichols says.