‘The Rider’ brings refreshing restraint to rodeo realities
“The Rider,” a marvelous film by Chloé Zhao, tells the story of rodeo horseman Brady Blackburn, who, after suffering a near-fatal head injury from being stepped on by a bucking bronco, must find his place within a world where the phrase “ride or die” takes on real meaning.
Blackburn is played by Brady Jandreau, a real-life bronc rider who sustained similar injuries. After Zhao met him while researching another film, she decided to create a movie around him, lightly fictionalizing his story and casting other nonprofessionals – including Brady’s father and sister – in supporting roles. Filmed with widescreen grandeur in South Dakota, “The Rider” reinvigorates tropes from the Western genre of men, horses, honor codes and vast expanses of nature with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, without sacrificing their inherent lyricism and poetry.
“The Rider” begins with Brady waking from a dream about his favorite old horse to the cold reality of an austere morning. The reflection that meets him is of a horrific gash along the side of his head, held together with staples. Working the rodeo circuit again is out of the question; now Brady must consider a future training horses or that dreaded fate: working a civilian job.
Zhao doesn’t weigh her protagonist down with an overbusy story. She simply follows him as he catches up with friends, banters with his sister and dad, and works with the horses with whom he shares an almost mystical bond. A film composed of elegant shots of endless prairies, moonlit campfires and rawboned faces, “The Rider” makes the most of silence, finding lyricism in the sound of tinkling wind chimes and rustling grass.
“The Rider” has excruciating moments and exquisite ones, too, of recklessness and resilience, and rituals of communion between Jandreau and his human and animal companions that take on the liminal beauty of prayer. Zhao is a filmmaker of extraordinary tact and insight: She has taken a story that could have been unremarkable or too romanticized and made it into something honest, magnificent and lasting.
Brady Jandreau in “The Rider.” MUST CREDIT: Sony Pictures Classics
Brady Jandreau plays himself in Western “The Rider.”