I was expecting more of a gritty, 1970s style realistic treatment.

I thought this would be the kind of movie that makes you feel like you are there watching the events unfold. I was hoping for a throwback to the style of movies like Five Easy Pieces, Midnight Cowboy, Scarecrow or other hyper-realistic 1970s movies.

This was some weird kind of mixture of biker-movie parody and hero-worship elegy. The look was way too stylized, with too much self-conscious post-modern mockery of the characters.

On one hand, visually, it treats the characters like mythic heroes, while simultaneously portraying them as morons through the dialogue and their actions.

What it really felt like was a filmed adaption of a graphic novel or a "serious" video game about bikers. I know it was based on a period photo book, but it really had the feel of a comic book/graphic novel based on a video game instead of a reality-based story. Not saying there were superheroes or monsters, but it just seemed very self-conscious and overly stylized. I'd put this on the shelf with Walter Hill's "Streets of Fire" rather than with more realistic biker films.

Also, I noticed a lot of anachronistic Millennial-speak in the dialogue: "I'm good" instead of "I'm fine" or "I'm OK", and one guy who always uses "salty" to describe being pissed off.