Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE RIDER” My rating: B 

104 minutes | MPAA rating: R

With “The Rider” it’s nearly impossible to say where real life ends and art begins.

In Chloe Zhao’s film Brady Jandreau portrays Brady Blackburn, a South Dakota rancher’s son who has suffered a near-fatal head injury during a rodeo competition.

Basically Jandreau is portraying himself…he suffered precisely that sort of head injury when thrown by a bucking bronc. His real-life father and sister (Tim and Lily Jandreau) portray his cinematic father and sibling.

And his real-life best friend, quadriplegic former bull rider Lane Scott, plays himself.

You can’t say this film lacks authenticity.

We first meet Brady just hours out of the hospital, where he spent a week in a coma before awakening and checking himself out against all medical advice. He’s got a new plate in his head and a set of stitches worthy of Frankenstein’s monster.  Frustrated, he uses a pair of pliers to pull the medical staples out of his skull.

The scar will eventually heal.  More problematic is what Brady will do with himself.  He’s been told that just riding a  horse — much less  climbing onto 600 pounds of angry bronco — could prove fatal.

His widowed, hard-drinking, barmaid-chasing father tells him to tough it out: “Play the cards you are dealt. Let it go.”

But Brady — who looks a bit like Josh Hartnett’s country cousin — feels utterly incomplete without his legs wrapped around a horse. Essentially “The Rider” is about whether for the sake of staying alive he can give up an essential part of himself.

Brady Jandreau

Writer/director Zhao — born in Beijing and educated in London and New York — met Jandreau pre-accident. He taught her to ride while she was making her first movie, “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

After his devastating head injury, she began writing a script that would incorporate Jandreau’s real-life situation and feature his actual friends and family members.

The results are visually splendid (cinematographer Joshua James Richards is a huge fan of the “magic hour” when the sun is either rising or setting) and emotionally affecting without ever resorting to melodrama.

Despite elements that any other film would milk for tears — the ranch is going belly up and Brady’s father must sell his son’s favorite horse, or his sister’s Asperger’s — “The Rider” is stubbornly anti-melodramatic.  Brady’s situation is explained with a minimum of emoting…the film’s biggest themes are implied rather than stated.

There is, for example, the cell phone footage of Brady and his buddy Lane in better days.  They can endlessly watch their own greatest rides.  In the case of Lane, who cannot speak and communicates via his one responsive hand, this is simply heartbreaking; it’s painful to compare the robust, cocky, self-assured Lane of the past with his wheelchair-bound present.

“The Rider” has a slice-of-life feel, unwinding slowly and methodically. But there are a couple of real hair-raising moments, as when Brady accepts another rancher’s offer to break an untamable horse. Zhao recorded the process over several hours and then edited it down to a devastating three minutes. We understand how important horses are to Brady, and what their loss will mean to him.

The performances by the amateur players are remarkable.  Nobody appears to be acting, which may be why there’s not one bad-actor moment on display. These are people just being themselves in front of a camera.

Which means that “The Rider” contains more human truth than a ton of superhero epics.

| Robert W. Butler