You don't say?
Those were the words (more or less, I may be paraphrasing a little bit) which came out of the mouth of one of the members of the New York chapter of the Black Label Bike Club, a group of sniveling overgrown children who like to ride around Brooklyn on ridiculously tall bikes and like, you know, get f*cked up and sh*t. This group, which is like a red-headed bastard step-child to the original chapter (which is based out of Minneapolis) is shown on screen embarrassing themselves in all sorts of ways. One of the main characters in this saga is a guy named Tony, from bourgeois suburban Portland, ME. This thoroughly white bread upper middle class punk, in his late twenties, moved to New York some years prior (when exactly is unspecified) to the filming of this movie, and quickly acquired a wiggerish demeanor, and ran with a crowd, based largely out of the Bushwick neighborhood of the borough of Brooklyn. When he's wasn't making an ass out himself pretending to be black, Tony found a way to ingratiate himself with one of the more flamboyant members of the B.L.B.C., this guy names Doyle. He has earned a reputation as one of the foremost Tall Bike Jousters in the world. Yes, these idiots actually get up on bikes that are like ten feet off the ground and joust each other. Not unsurprisingly, some of these people ended up in the back of ambulances after hitting their heads on the hard pavement during said sport. So anyway, Tony and Doyle are buddies and Doyle is trying to get Tony into the club, but a lot of the members think that Tony's too much of a drug addled idiot to be an asset to the club. The main dramatic arc of the film is Tony's struggle for acceptance amongst the super-hip Black Labels (the group received lucrative TV offers from MTV and the Discovery Channel, to name a couple of the giant corporations eager to cash in on the Bike Club Culture mystique, and the Black Label Bike Club in particular.)
We follow the crew around the country and around the world. In one sequence, the NY chapter heads out to Minneapolis (by car, by the way; what the hell?) for some sort of annual ride (which is kinda like Sturgis, except much, much lamer.) Eventually, all the chapters from around the country (including, in addition to Minneapolis and New York, Austin, Reno and a "nomadic" chapter called Nowhere) get together in the woods at some National Park and party down. The tension between the old-school original chapter members from Minneapolis and the new-school, art-school educated hipster elite Brooklyn chapter members is so thick you can cut it with a knife, nicely coming to a head when a drunken Tony (not even a member, but rolling with Brooklyn) stumbles out of the woods bare-ass naked and proceeds to displease one of the founders of the original chapter, not to mention pretty much everyone else.
After this debacle in the woods, Tony is told bluntly by Doyle that there are many members, even in the New York chapter, who are opposed to him joining the group. Meanwhile, Doyle plots to ride a home-made rocket bike (presumably with fuel left over from the road trip to Minnesota) through the streets at the club's annual giant underground party.
Doyle and dejected Tony proceed to fly (on a jetliner filled with gasoline) to Amsterdam for the "world championship" of bike jousting. It's funny how they eat from the dumpsters (not that I'm opposed to that, per se) but they can afford to fly to Europe to take part in something so frivolous as an unofficial bike jousting tournament (the guy who runs it looks like Tommy Chong in 20 years with dreads.) Well, after a night of hard drinking in Amsterdam, Tony gets his ass kicked for trying to steal a bottle of booze from some Dutchmen and ends up, essentially, breaking up with Doyle (theirs' was a bromance for the ages.) After they go back to NY, Doyle continues working on his jet bike, and Tony runs of to his parent's house in Maine to sulk and lay off the 'Ron for a while. Tony's father, a professor, is rather amusing giving analytical analysis of the group which his son has been spurned from.
Eventually, Tony returns to NY to plot his vengeance, by recruiting some of his other bike culture reject buddies into his newly-formed bike club. They plan to crash the party where Doyle will be riding his rocket bike, and challenge the Black Labels to a jousting match. It's all rather Arthurian towards the end. Long story short, Tony embarrasses himself... again, and Doyle rides his rocket bike into glory.
While I found the subjects of this film to be by and large distasteful to the extreme, that didn't take away from the film itself, which tells a fairly captivating tale on several different levels. As a document of cutting edge hipsterism, this will surely be invaluable to future historians and sociologists. As a simply human tale, this movie also succeeds fairly well, hitting as it does on some age-old truths about human social behaviors and the desire of acceptance by a group of one's peers. In this regard, Tony deserves some credit for the bravery it must have taken to allow himself to be portrayed on screen in such a pathetic light (he was one of the directors of the film.) Perhaps he can grow up a little now that he has thoroughly humiliated himself for the world to see. All in all, a good look at an annoying subculture.
Those were the words (more or less, I may be paraphrasing a little bit) which came out of the mouth of one of the members of the New York chapter of the Black Label Bike Club, a group of sniveling overgrown children who like to ride around Brooklyn on ridiculously tall bikes and like, you know, get f*cked up and sh*t. This group, which is like a red-headed bastard step-child to the original chapter (which is based out of Minneapolis) is shown on screen embarrassing themselves in all sorts of ways. One of the main characters in this saga is a guy named Tony, from bourgeois suburban Portland, ME. This thoroughly white bread upper middle class punk, in his late twenties, moved to New York some years prior (when exactly is unspecified) to the filming of this movie, and quickly acquired a wiggerish demeanor, and ran with a crowd, based largely out of the Bushwick neighborhood of the borough of Brooklyn. When he's wasn't making an ass out himself pretending to be black, Tony found a way to ingratiate himself with one of the more flamboyant members of the B.L.B.C., this guy names Doyle. He has earned a reputation as one of the foremost Tall Bike Jousters in the world. Yes, these idiots actually get up on bikes that are like ten feet off the ground and joust each other. Not unsurprisingly, some of these people ended up in the back of ambulances after hitting their heads on the hard pavement during said sport. So anyway, Tony and Doyle are buddies and Doyle is trying to get Tony into the club, but a lot of the members think that Tony's too much of a drug addled idiot to be an asset to the club. The main dramatic arc of the film is Tony's struggle for acceptance amongst the super-hip Black Labels (the group received lucrative TV offers from MTV and the Discovery Channel, to name a couple of the giant corporations eager to cash in on the Bike Club Culture mystique, and the Black Label Bike Club in particular.)
We follow the crew around the country and around the world. In one sequence, the NY chapter heads out to Minneapolis (by car, by the way; what the hell?) for some sort of annual ride (which is kinda like Sturgis, except much, much lamer.) Eventually, all the chapters from around the country (including, in addition to Minneapolis and New York, Austin, Reno and a "nomadic" chapter called Nowhere) get together in the woods at some National Park and party down. The tension between the old-school original chapter members from Minneapolis and the new-school, art-school educated hipster elite Brooklyn chapter members is so thick you can cut it with a knife, nicely coming to a head when a drunken Tony (not even a member, but rolling with Brooklyn) stumbles out of the woods bare-ass naked and proceeds to displease one of the founders of the original chapter, not to mention pretty much everyone else.
After this debacle in the woods, Tony is told bluntly by Doyle that there are many members, even in the New York chapter, who are opposed to him joining the group. Meanwhile, Doyle plots to ride a home-made rocket bike (presumably with fuel left over from the road trip to Minnesota) through the streets at the club's annual giant underground party.
Doyle and dejected Tony proceed to fly (on a jetliner filled with gasoline) to Amsterdam for the "world championship" of bike jousting. It's funny how they eat from the dumpsters (not that I'm opposed to that, per se) but they can afford to fly to Europe to take part in something so frivolous as an unofficial bike jousting tournament (the guy who runs it looks like Tommy Chong in 20 years with dreads.) Well, after a night of hard drinking in Amsterdam, Tony gets his ass kicked for trying to steal a bottle of booze from some Dutchmen and ends up, essentially, breaking up with Doyle (theirs' was a bromance for the ages.) After they go back to NY, Doyle continues working on his jet bike, and Tony runs of to his parent's house in Maine to sulk and lay off the 'Ron for a while. Tony's father, a professor, is rather amusing giving analytical analysis of the group which his son has been spurned from.
Eventually, Tony returns to NY to plot his vengeance, by recruiting some of his other bike culture reject buddies into his newly-formed bike club. They plan to crash the party where Doyle will be riding his rocket bike, and challenge the Black Labels to a jousting match. It's all rather Arthurian towards the end. Long story short, Tony embarrasses himself... again, and Doyle rides his rocket bike into glory.
While I found the subjects of this film to be by and large distasteful to the extreme, that didn't take away from the film itself, which tells a fairly captivating tale on several different levels. As a document of cutting edge hipsterism, this will surely be invaluable to future historians and sociologists. As a simply human tale, this movie also succeeds fairly well, hitting as it does on some age-old truths about human social behaviors and the desire of acceptance by a group of one's peers. In this regard, Tony deserves some credit for the bravery it must have taken to allow himself to be portrayed on screen in such a pathetic light (he was one of the directors of the film.) Perhaps he can grow up a little now that he has thoroughly humiliated himself for the world to see. All in all, a good look at an annoying subculture.