Hive mind shift change.
Nothing in Cyberpunk 2077 brings you into closer contact with Night City’s storied past than Johnny Silverhand, the once-legendary rock star whose digitized consciousness takes up residence in your head via a highly sought-after biochip you slot into your brain during a heist gone sideways. Johnny is central to some of the biggest upheavals in Night City history, and as you carry the cybernetic construct of his personality around with you, playable flashbacks thrust you into that history, giving you a taste both of the blur of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll that made up much of his life, and of the anticorporate actions that have him branded as a terrorist in some people’s eyes.
In the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG, one of the playable classes is the rockerboy, a term for any musician or artist whose work stirs up public sentiment against evil corporations or other social ills. To me, the rockerboys are the one thing that prevents Cyberpunk as a property from being wholly defined by cynicism and violence. There’s something earnest and hopeful about the fact that the tabletop game wants players to see themselves not just as heavily armed solos and skilled netrunners, but also as artists whose creative output has the potential to change the world for the better. Of course, you can’t play as a rockerboy in Cyberpunk 2077, because V is a merc by trade, but that earnest ideology is still present in Johnny. Even if it’s covered up by layers of affected detachment, he’s still prone to reminiscing about the old days by saying grandiose things like this: “We fought for beauty. Not knowin’ what was good or true, was only the beautiful that meant a damn thing to us.”
This is what I least expected about Cyberpunk 2077: that its notions of “cool” are so tied up in the digital persona of a past-his-prime rocker that the game sometimes feels like looking through your uncle’s musty record collection while he talks about how great the Rolling Stones are. When William Gibson’s genre-defining novels like Neuromancer and Count Zero first appeared in the mid-’80s, they were thrilling in part because they offered a vision of the future that felt entirely new, and with it, a whole new vision of “cool.” I believe there’s still potential for cyberpunk stories to be so boldly visionary and relevant, but Cyberpunk 2077 prefers to look back, an attitude reflected not just through Johnny’s efforts to avenge old grudges and to recapture the glory days of his band Samurai. In fact, the game’s entire worldview feels like the product of someone who’s about 30 years behind the times, who may have been rebellious and liberated once but who nowadays doesn’t understand why it’s messed up to call sex workers “whores,” as Johnny routinely does.
Johnny Silverhand has some unsavory attitudes about sex workers in Cyberpunk 2077
Image: CD Projekt Red via Polygon
Johnny is played, of course, by Keanu Reeves, and I can’t imagine anyone else in the role. Johnny is an asshole, with an ego as big as Night City, whose every word is uttered as if it’s so important that the whole world should take heed. But with Reeves’ charisma in play, this nigh-insufferable character remains just barely sufferable. Full disclosure: I’m a huge Keanu Reeves fan. I think there’s a vulnerability to him that makes even characters like John Wick, who in other hands might feel completely inaccessible and irredeemable, recognizably human.
So it is here, too. Reeves’ natural tendencies as an actor help offset the worst tendencies of the character he’s playing, such that we can still understand, if only barely, why his old bandmates and other associates put up with him at all. This game isn’t the best vehicle for Reeves’ work, because while he provides both voice-over and motion capture for Johnny, there’s sometimes a disconnect between the two, moments where the animations Johnny performs don’t quite reflect the urgency or intensity of what he’s saying. And yet, I was always glad to walk into some dimly lit motel room or exclusive bar and find Johnny lurking in the corner, visible only to V, ready with some world-weary quip. Night City may be the star of Cyberpunk 2077, but Johnny Silverhand is its soul — weathered, outmoded, often tiresome, yet still weirdly compelling.