We’re On the Cusp of a New Generation of Male Movie Stars, and I’m Here for It
by Ted Kluck
Whether I did or didn’t just rewatch the trailer for this summer’s blockbuster “The Bike Riders” 35 times in a row is immaterial. What matters is that in addition to basically making a movie just for me (Chicago, 1965, leather jackets, bar fights, The Rolling Stones, Tom Hardy), “The Bike Riders” features Exhibit A in my argument that we’re about to enjoy a 20-year run of Cool Dudes In Movies, the likes of which we haven’t enjoyed in a long time.
Exhibit A is an actor named Austin Butler who was really believable as a B-17 pilot in “Masters of the Air” and also as Elvis Presley. He has a deep voice and passes the “does he look comfortable holding a gun and a cigarette?” litmus test that I require of all male movie stars.
For the past decade or so, actors like Timothee Chalamet (I know “Dune 2” was good, but he’s not a movie star) and Tom Holland have been failing that test miserably, and it’s my assertion that both of these actors would blow away in a stiff breeze. They were emblematic of a generation of movie stars whose chief end was just to be inoffensive on screen, and to embody whatever audiences wanted them to embody. If the color beige could be a person, it would be actors like this. Hence, the need for Butler, and the need to come roaring out of the “Millennial Wimp and Marvel” era with a movie like “The Bike Riders.”
Exhibit B is an actor named Jeremy Allen White, who was the chef at the center of Hulu’s hit series “The Bear” (also, incidentally, a great Chicago thing) and who is the right kind of strong, the right kind of weird looking, and has the right kind of mountain of hair to be wildly charismatic and believable as a movie cool guy. He has already played a professional wrestler in a movie and is about to play Bruce Springsteen (what?!). He passes the gun/bar-fight/cigarette litmus test and I’m here for it.
Why, you may ask, is this important? Well, we have a litany of Movie Cool Guy Hall of Famers in their 70s and 80s – guys like Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino et. al. We also have a nice run of 50’s-ish movie stars in Brad Pitt, Tom Hardy, Ben Affleck, Vince Vaughn, and George Clooney. These are all guys who could believably be your consigliere, your accomplice in robbing a Las Vegas casino, the general manager of your small-market baseball team, or your lead investigator in hunting down Dr. Richard Kimball.
I wouldn’t trust Chalamet to feed my cats and bring in my mail.
We’ve weirdly had nobody for a couple of decades. We had two boring Tom’s (Hiddleston and Holland), Jessie Eisenberg whose ceiling is “quirky” or “depressing Noah Baumbach films,” Robert Pattinson (boring), Michael Cera (a meme), Chris Hemsworth (who I love but who can’t carry a movie), and Liam Hemsworth (boring). Their generation’s best and most believable action star was a girl (Jennifer Lawrence). Even Gosling – who is admittedly amazing – always seems to be doing a self-aware Gosling thing.
But perhaps this is more a referendum on us, culturally, than it is about anybody in the above paragraph. And perhaps we’re pivoting back into allowing our male movie stars to be men of conviction and action – two ideas that seem for a while to have fallen out of fashion. The best thing about White’s character in “The Bear” was his earnest devotion to his craft, his kitchen, and his family. Butler’s character in “Masters” was a brave and loyal leader. There was nothing demure about either of them. And the absolute best thing about both of these projects was that they were earnestly what they were and not commentaries on a genre or a cultural moment. I want my movie star to take me out of my world for two hours, and put me in the world that he’s creating.