The Rider. Written, directed and produced by Chloe Zhao. Starring Brady Jandreau. Rating: 9 (out of 10)
“Cowboy up” is a colloquial version of “man up,” that command designed to bully the listener into just gritting one’s teeth and getting on with it, damn the danger and the consequences.
It’s a message that Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) hears frequently from his friends on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, though Brady is only a few months into recovery from a serious rodeo accident that left him with a metal plate in his skull. We know it to be a cruel challenge to his manhood, especially since we watched Brady remove metal staples from his head with a Bowie knife in the opening scene.
Chloe Zhao’s astonishing film about a young man’s identity crisis amidst a withering way of American life features a cast of non-actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Brady lives in a trailer with his dad and his sister, Lilly (played by Brady’s real father and sister Tim and Lilly Jandreau) and makes frequent visits to his friend Lane (Lane Scott), a former star of the local rodeo circuit left paralyzed and speechless after an accident.
Beijing-born, U.S.-schooled Zhao met the Jandreau family while shooting her first film Songs My Brothers Taught Me, a film about limited prospects for young people on a Lakota reservation. She was fascinated by Brady’s love of the land and instinctive horse-training abilities and started fashioning a film around him. That was before his 2016 rodeo accident.
The doctors tell Brady that he risks injury and death by riding again. With no high school, no GED, he resignedly takes a “temporary” job at a drug store, stocking shelves and mopping floors in between bouts of nausea and a debilitating cramp in his right hand that is so severe, he needs to pry his fingers free with his left hand. “Ride through the pain” or become a farmer, a fate worse than death, apparently. In this cowboy culture of masculinity, you are nothing if you can’t ride.
Steering him through the healing process is Brady’s sister Lilly, who has Asperger’s. She sings him to sleep in one scene, covers him in gold stars in another. Their protectiveness of each other keeps Brady grounded even as their dad is out at the bar or playing video slots. There are back payments due on the trailer, and mom died young. (We lament her absence as Lilly repeatedly refuses to wear a bra, saying she doesn’t want to turn 15, she’d rather just stay 14.)
There are innumerable tender moments in this film, between brother and sister, between Brady and Lane, and between man and animal. In one amazing sequence, Brady trains an unbroken horse using limitless patience and almost no verbal commands. In another, we watch, heartbroken, as he struggles to whistle for his horse. Prayers are said with equal reverence for horses and humans alike.
He may be a novice, but Jandreau is a marvel of restraint, communicating more with his bare-all expression than most actors can do with a page of dialogue.
Sure, Zhao’s film is about getting back in the saddle, letting go of the reins (insert appropriate equine metaphor here); but it’s never that reductive. The Rider simply offers up an authentic and memorable film about one man’s search for his place in the world.
