The Rid­er

A man ris­es up from a bed with a ban­dage wrapped around his head. There’s a lit­tle island of blood and pus which has soaked up through the fab­ric. With­out so much as flinch­ing, he cuts away the dress­ing with a knife to reveal track-like sta­ples run­ning run­ning like a cres­cent above his right ear.

This is Brady (Brady Jan­dreau, play­ing a light­ly-fic­tion­alised ver­sion of him­self), a Zen-like Dakotan rodeo ace who is lucky to be alive hav­ing been stomped on by a wild horse that got the bet­ter of him in the ring. He appears remark­ably chilled about what is clear­ly a dire sit­u­a­tion, his first order of busi­ness being to skip the bed rest that doc­tors have urged him to take and get back to las­so practice.

Chloé Zhao’s The Rid­er is a wist­ful ode to a lost Amer­i­ca and to the folks who remain point­ed­ly out of synch with the steady march of progress. Brady’s dilem­ma is a per­ti­nent one: does he risk life and limb to do the thing he loves, or does he get into bor­ing lock­step with the tra­di­tion­al cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem? His depen­dents include a younger sis­ter with learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties (Lil­ly Jan­dreau) and a father with a gam­bling prob­lem, for whom he dear­ly wants to pro­vide. He shows no sor­row when vis­it­ing his old rodeo bud­dy Lane, now paral­ysed and unable to speak. They hoot along to online videos of the glo­ry days, refus­ing to believe they won’t some­day be back on a buck­ing bron­co despite their severe injuries.

Zhao’s restraint is admirable, but there’s a sense that the film is surg­ing towards an inevitable end point where Brady will be forced to choose between a prob­a­bly painful death and hap­pi­ness, or life and eter­nal dis­ap­point­ment. And if there’s any crit­i­cism here, it’s that this tried-and-test­ed sto­ry arc doesn’t real­ly offer poten­tial for big sur­pris­es. From the first five min­utes of footage, you can guess exact­ly where this one is going to go.

Yet the film is blessed with a num­ber of mag­i­cal sequences, usu­al­ly when Zhao’s doc­u­men­tary instinct kicks in and she just observes as Brady weaves his equine mag­ic. Some­times that’s just nat­ter­ing to Lil­ly against the half-light, detail­ing the bright future he has promised her. Oth­er times it involves his var­i­ous inter­ac­tions with hors­es which chan­nel an aching desire to be can­ter­ing across the prairies once more.

Two sequences show Brady break­ing in some row­dy colts, and the wiz­ardry he per­forms is pre­sent­ed on the lev­el of intri­cate brain surgery. It’s almost as if he is silent­ly com­muning with the ani­mals and benign­ly bend­ing them to his will. To com­plete the trans­ac­tion, he needs to just hop on their back and ride them around the pen, but he knows his body can’t take it any more.

While Brady blind­ly roman­ti­cis­es the ways of the Old West and the flinty demands of man­hood, Zhao large­ly dis­miss­es it all as macho bull­shit. The film is about Brady devel­op­ing a sense of his own mor­tal­i­ty, and not being able to work with hors­es is, for him, its own type of slow death. In the end, Zhao sug­gests that only by liv­ing will we dis­cov­er new pos­si­bil­i­ties, new hopes and new turns in the road.

There are so many indi­vid­ual moments here that are bril­liant, and you might want to bet your life sav­ings that this amaz­ing direc­tor will deliv­er her first mas­ter­piece soon­er rather than later.