“The Bikeriders” is hands-down the most pointless biker movie ever made.

With a narrative limping along on one training wheel, it mopes in an inane circle through the middle era of modern biker gangs, between the post-war “Wild One” birth of such “clubs” and ending just as the Hell’s Angels, The Outlaws, Bandidos and Mongols moved from traffic scofflaws and motorcycle theft into the drugs, extortion, prostitution and murder-for-hire of true organized crime outfits.

The best book about such gangs and this period was by Hunter S. Thompson, “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.” “Bikeriders” is based on Danny Lyon’s 1968 photos and interviews book of the same “Bikeroders” title.

Based solely on the movie, Lyons’ must be the inferior piece of journalism and character study. Based on writer-director Jeff Nichols’ casting of the interviewer “Danny” in the movie, played without wit, color or the suggestion of intellectual curiosity by Mike Faist, Nichols wasn’t all that impressed with it or him either.

As the viewer waits for a point to creep in, something beyond romanticizing or demythologizing the original “One Percenters” as louts, dolts and drop-outs, one wished somebody had paid more attention to “Sons of Anarchy” back when it was on the TeeVee. This isn’t just bad. It’s fatally uninteresting.

Austin Butler is Benny, a reckless, heedless Illinois punk who says “You’d have to KILL me to get this jacket,” his beloved Vandals’ “colors,” in a biker-unfriendly bar in Greater Chicagoland.

Benny is tough, able to take a beating, and a masochist, more than willing to take it.

He’s also so stupid he can’t figure the odds, evaluate his own fighting skills, and work out a better battle to pick.

We see how Benny met “riders club” founder Johnny (Tom Hardy) and how the two came to depend on one another. Kind of. As the story is told by Benny’s on-again/off-again biker moll Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, every bit of the history is sketched in by a long-winded woman with no gift for getting to the point, or having one.

Nichols makes this Comer and Kathy’s movie, as her endless anecdotes and dull history lessons begin with the fateful night a girlfriend lured her into a biker bar “meeting,” where leering, “You got a man?” come-ons start out aggressive and take on real menace.

Benny was her savior that night. And he sat on his parked Harley all night in front of her house and all the next day until her working Joe boyfriend stormed out on her.

Johnny? His “Don’t worry…about nothing,” implies that he and Benny can protect her from the other Vandals, and that the Vandals can protect her from outside threats.

Here’s the neat thing about this script. The “outside threats” are few and far between, generic biker tussles in the “fists or knives” mid-60s. The gang rides to intimidate unfriendlies of every stripe, little motorized Nuremberg rally visuals for the awed locals.

Is there a political parallel for today, that the thugs the culture fears are nothing but empty Levi’s jackets on bikes? Nah.

I’ve been a big fan of Nichols since his “Shotgun Stories” debut, through “Mud” and “Loving.” But “Bikeriders” is an artless parade of closeups, waiting for the actors to get to the nub of a line, the movie to impress on us the necessity of a scene and the narrative to come to some sort of point.

Comer’s monologues are banalities sprinkled with cliches, none of them amounting to a nugget of profundity or a big theme about alienation, nihilism and “guys who don’t belong nowhere else,” they just “belong together.”

Any messaging about “The Golden Age” of motorcycle gangs, before they turned even more criminal, is laughable.

Comer is believable in the part, but like even the “types” in the gang — save for Michael Shannon, playing the doltish, foreign-born “Zipco” — Kathy is painted in colorless strokes. We don’t see an interior life, the dullness she might be escaping, the dead-end her limited future offers, the danger she stupidly ignores until the obvious happens.

Butler? He’s about as convincing a dangerous biker as Elvis was.

As my attention drifted into how one might have gotten a more compelling, entertaining or enlightening movie about this culture (adapt a BETTER WRITTEN BOOK) and era, bits of miscasting, scenes that defy cinematic convention and merely frustrate when they could titillate, terrify or what-have-you, I burned-out that rear tire down to the threads of one ugly conclusion.

This is a two hour waste of a lot of fine vintage motorcycles.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus, Mike Faist and Michael Shannon.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeff Nichols, based on a book by Danny Lyons. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:56