Around these parts, there are few excuses to be inside watching screens instead of, say, out on your wheels. But let’s say you shattered your collarbone in Lap 3 of a criterium and you’re experiencing road withdrawal. Here are a few pictures that will keep your spirit moving, if not your body.
The Armstrong Lie Lance Armstrong’s epic downfall was enabled by an entire sporting culture gone astray, but his own towering megalomania was the fuel that turned faulty wiring into a house ablaze. The 2013 doc is based on extensive new interviews with Armstrong, who even as he admits his culpability still seems to show no genuine remorse. It may seem a stretch to call someone who never actually killed anyone a monster, but this film will leave you with little doubt that in a different age, Lance Armstrong could have been a delusional, brutal, manipulative dictator. —DM
The Bicycle Thief The original Italian title for this groundbreaking classic from the boot is The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Bicicletti). a heart-wrenching tale of post-war strife that helped spur the neorealism movement in world cinema. The barebones, day-in-the-life tale makes up for its simple storyline with suspense, subtle but rich characterizations, immersive cinematography and a sympathetic protagonist, Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) — a poor advertising-bill poster who’s desperately searching for the man who stole his bicycle — which his wife had just acquired by hocking the family’s linens because the bike was required for his new job. As you can imagine, it’s not the film to watch after a trying day at work or after your own bicycle has been ripped off, but Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 drama is a must-see for all film lovers. —JG
BMX Bandits The 1983 movie might not be great or even good, but this obscure Australian production is a big fat casserole of 1980s nostalgia. First and foremost, the teen heroes’ mixed-neon bikes and outfits were power-clashing before that was a thing, and fully deserve a return to the streets. Then there’s the very ’80s absurdity of the plot: three teenagers, including an impossibly young Nicole Kidman, discover a box of walkie-talkies earmarked for use in a bank robbery, then spend an hour using bike stunts to outrun the baddies. So basically, Gymkata for BMX. —DM
Breaking Away A coming-of-age classic with working-class grit and charm, and plenty of laughs. Set in a town that’s as Midwestern as you can get — Bloomington, Ind. — the film follows dreamy, ambitious Dave Stohler (Dennis Christopher) and his dead-end buddies who embrace the nickname “Cutters,” a pejorative term that the preppier-than-thou college kids have coined for the offspring of local quarrymen. Dave, a 10-speed racer comically obsessed with all things Italian, woos a college girl by pretending to be a foreign exchange student and persuades his buddies Mike, Cyril and Moocher (Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern and Jackie Earle Haley) to enter a race run by the university. With unforgettable performances by Paul Dooley and Barbarie Barrie as Dave’s parents, Peter Yates’s 1979 film has a sweeping soundtrack and won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay in one of the best years for moviemaking, period. —JG
The Kid With a Bike The 2011 Belgian import Le gamin au vélo is another uplifting bike tale with unflinching realism and grit to match its sweeter, heartwarming moments. In the film, 12-year-old Cyril escapes his foster home to search for his father and lost bike. A new friend and maternal figure, Samantha, helps Cyril get his bike back and tracks down his father, and deal with the neighborhood dealer, who takes him under his wing. Cyril learns some hard lessons, but, thankfully, the film veers from being too maudlin and heavy-handed. Great performances all-around. —JG
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure Nothing tells us more about the glorious man-child Pee-Wee Herman than his determination to recover his amazingly tricked-out red cruiser. As directed by Tim Burton before things went so terribly wrong, Pee-Wee’s 1985 trek takes him through a world full of amazing characters and an America made as weird and wondrous as Tunisia. This movie is about why we bike — because, whatever our age, what we really want is adventure, freedom, and an Abe Lincoln-shaped machine to make us breakfast. —DM
Premium Rush This is pretty much a remake of BMX Bandits with better production values, and fixies in the place of BMX. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a New York bike messenger who picks up the wrong package (cue ominous diegetic music), then has to scramble madly around NYC on two wheels to escape a bunch of bad guys. If you’ve ever done any serious urban riding, the chase sequences are pretty damned hair-raising — though you could take issue with the 2012 movie, which makes popcorn entertainment out of the cars-vs-bikes battle that causes hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries every year. —DM
A Sunday in Hell Though its deadpan narration and distant storytelling can make it feel dated, this 1976 Danish documentary should be weighed less against the charismatic Hoop Dreams than against a more poetic and abstract doc like Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. It chronicles the 1976 Paris-Roubaix spring classic with a methodical attention to detail that makes it an amazing primer on how to watch cycling, walking the viewer through the various roles and stakes of the race. There’s also a slow, elegiac thoughtfulness that reminds us of what the sport has lost over the last decade — a reverence and air of nobility that may never return. —DM
This article appears in Jan 1-7, 2015.