After The Bikeriders, I am not worried about Austin Butler’s career. The movie asks him to be both a fetishized golden god of rough-and-tumble American masculinity and a young man performing that identity to make himself feel a little less alone, and Butler steers his chopper through both parts well enough. When I saw the film in a theater, a group of teenage girls behind me gasped when Butler appeared onscreen for the first time, and I — someone whose similar formative moment decades ago involved Leonardo DiCaprio and Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” — really do get what that feeling is like. But I know I’m in my late 30s with a body perpetually in need of physical therapy, because what I also thought when Butler made his Bikeriders entrance was this: I am worried about this man’s neck.
Tons of actors make a certain sort of physicality a part of their identity and appeal. Timothy Olyphant and Brad Pitt are great leaners; Tom Cruise’s running form is famous; Julia Roberts’s toothy smile is a multigenre asset across rom-coms, metafiction, and populist thrillers. And Butler? His screen presence is defined by a recurring tendency to squish his neck downward toward his torso and angle his head at a variety of not-90-degree angles. Nothing suggests that he’s hurting anyone else on set with this level of commitment (unlike some people, ahem). This man’s body, though! Is it not in pain from the array of crushed, cramped, and squeezed positions he keeps putting himself into?
Consider the evidence from The Bikeriders. In nearly every scene as Chicago Vandals motorcycle club member Benny, Butler is working the hunch-and-tilt. When flirting with his future wife, Kathy (Jodie Comer). When turning down club president Johnny’s (Tom Hardy) offer to become the next leader of the Vandals. When getting ready to fight hostile customers at a bar where he’s drinking, or seated at a campfire, or attending a funeral, or realizing that maybe being an outlaw isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. His physicality doesn’t really change, and it always looks like he’s either working through a cramp or about to get one. I almost experienced “I just woke up from a crappy nap in a too-small airplane seat, and everything is stiff” sympathy pains watching all this.
Benny doesn’t seem uncomfortable in his own body, so I’m not sure there’s a narrative reason why he’s so constantly scrunched. Without a textual answer, then, we must look at Butler’s prior filmography to try and understand why he chooses to look so often like a strikingly handsome and very grumpy bird. My first guess: Maybe this position is a holdover from Elvis and how many times in that movie Butler sang into a mic that didn’t seem placed high enough for his six-foot frame:
Or maybe it became Butler’s routine after Dune: Part Two, where the knifeplay enthusiast na-Baron Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen had a real reptilian, serpentine vibe to contrast with Paul Atreides’s more heroic, upstanding comportment (well, at least until the film’s end):
But let’s go back further. Maybe we should be wondering what inspired Butler to do this exact same move in The Dead Don’t Die, in which he plays a destined-to-die friend of Selena Gomez, going on a road trip through a zombie-infested town. Butler isn’t so tall that he can only meet people at their level by slanting and contorting. Jim Jarmusch, explain yourself.
Quentin Tarantino could be responsible too, because Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood may have kicked off this Butler-bearing trend when he played Charles Manson acolyte and Manson Family member Tex. Look at Butler’s Gumby-like skew on that horse. Are this man’s shoulders ever level?
Will anyone answer for this? And if not, may I make some suggestions? Perhaps Butler needs a more supportive pillow, or an inversion table, or to work with a director who will be brave enough to let him stand upright. Next time, get some apple crates for Hardy to stand on, elongate the mic stand, and stop making Butler stand like this — like a collapsed accordion, an undercooked sausage that doesn’t fill its external casing, a sheepish giraffe. Butler is one of our few future A-list contenders. Protect those vertebrae at all costs.