Everyone has a thing that they love. I mean, love love. It’s a thing that you so cherish to the point that it starts to define who you are, and parting ways with that would be like parting with a piece of your soul. Brady Blackburn’s (Brady Jandreau) thing is horse whispering, and due to circumstances out of his control, he might lose his thing. The Rider shows just how horrifying it can be to give up something you wake up for just for the purposes of not dying. Dang it, where are the tissues?
The Rider is actually based on Jandreau’s real life as a bull rider from the Lakota tribe in South Dakota. After a freak terrible ride, Brady gets staples in his head and can’t ride his horses while he recovers. So he passes the time like any young kid would do where he is. He visits his buddy Lane Scott (himself, Brady’s friend in real life) and helps Scott with his recovery efforts. He gets a job at the local convenient store. He spends time with his dad Wayne and sister Lilly (Jandreau’s real life father Tim and sister Lilly). He BS’s with friends. Through all of this, Brady is trying to see if he can live without his true passion: horse training and riding, because all the signs are pointing to that time of his life coming to an end.
As you can tell, this movie could have ended up just woefully bleak and depressing. In order to make us care about Brady, and how agonizing his decision is, writer/director Chloe Zhao has to make the audience understand how important horses are to Brady’s life. An inferior movie would have all the supporting characters point this out to him endlessly until the point gets driven home. Not Ms. Zhao, though. Each time Brady comes into the vicinity of these majestic animals, Brady comes alive with them. The training sequences are longer than expected to show how much whispering talent Brady possesses, and the supporting characters show how much they care by being as encouraging as is possible despite Brady’s injuries. Zhao’s biggest contribution are these just tear inducing tracking shots of Brady riding a horse with the Badlands and rolling South Dakota hills in the background. In older Westerns, Brady would spend all his time staring at these intense landscapes contemplating (he does do some of that here too, equally breathtaking), but instead of celebrating a battle with many murders, The Rider celebrates the simple joy and rightness a rider feels on a horse: freedom incarnate.
This glorious traversing of the countryside in a cowboy uniform is jarringly juxtaposed with a scene of Brady checking items as a cashier, in a “professional” uniform. When watching The Rider, the off putting nature of that name tag makes you realize that Barry is actually in costume here: the cowboy get up is who he really is. The sad truth is, The Rider confronts the reality of the dangers of this type of life in the relative fast lane. A brilliant character touch is giving Brady these lingering muscle seizures when he grabs something tightly, as if he’s grabbing the rope before a horse starts to buck, like a pit bull. When you see Brady forcibly unclench his hand, you feel that pain he’s feeling inside where even his subconscious is telling him where he should be. The relationship with Lane Scott serves a nice twofold purpose in the screenplay; 1. It gives the audience a glimpse of what a good guy Brady is, and 2. We peer dishearteningly into the poor boy’s potential future in horse riding: laid up and 95% incapacitated. So the just gut wrenching decision lays before him: die doing what he loves, or give that love up, and risk just dying a slow miserable death. As the story reaches its conclusion, this fear of the decision looms large over the 3rd act, and left me worried about what Brady was going to decide, because like him, it seems like a choice of die fast or die slow.
I’m pretty sure Chloe Zhao spent no more than an hour or two with Brady Jandreau before realizing that he has the stuff. As far as I know, Jandreau is the first Indian Cowboy I have seen onscreen in the movies, and maybe as far as I’m concerned, the last one I’ll need to see. He is simply amazing in this film, carrying so much emotional weight in his face. Jandreau has that glorious long stare all great cinematic cowboys need, but once he’s around people, Jandreau suppresses those emotions and changes from longing to extremely loving and empathetic, using that twang and smile to perfection. His big Juno-like scene in a pickup truck is a well controlled emotional release that completely fits how the character of Brady would react in the movie. Yes, I know it helps that clearly he knows the stakes of The Rider since it’s probably based on his life, but I’m pretty sure my autobiographical film would suck because of me, because nothing I ever do will make me look the part of actor like Jandreau on the back of that horse riding across the horizon.
Here’s the sum up of why I think The Rider will work for anyone. I’m born and raised in the city, hate hiking, and never remotely considered living in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t be a worse demographic for The Rider; in fact, I was already sleepy when I started watching it. By the time the movie ended, I looked down, and realized I was on the edge of my seat, grasping the cup holders, leaning forward to wait for what was going to happen next, and my first steps after watching were weighed down by how much this movie had wrapped me under its spell. If a city boy like me can connect with Lakotan sensation Brady Jandreau and his horses, I’m sure you’ll find a way to as well!