When Lupita Nyong’o ascended the stage to accept her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2014, the straight-out-of-drama-school newcomer captured hearts around the world with her declaration that “When I look down at this golden statue, may it remind me and every little child that no matter where you’re from, your dreams are valid”. Miles away from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, within the grassy Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of North Dakota, 22-year-old cowboy Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) is trying to recover his dreams of rodeo ring glory after a major blow to his skull. The doctor wants him to rest and take it easy, but Brady isn’t interested. Rather, he checks out of the hospital early, picks off the bandage around his head and grabs his lasso for some morning practice. This isn’t going to be his last rodeo.
The Rider is director Chloé Zhao’s second feature film, an exquisite blend of real-life and fictional narratives brought together by the universal struggle of reconciling your dreams with the constraints of the possible. Zhao first met the actor Brady Jandreau when shooting her first film Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015); after discovering that the cowboy had made the life-defying choice to return to horse training mere weeks after having his skull bashed in at a local rodeo, Zhao knew that she had found both the subject and narrative for her next feature. Jandreau’s real-life experience as a cowboy fighting premature retirement is blended with Zhao’s script to produce a ‘docu-fiction’ on the lives of horse trainers and riders living in the Sioux. Brady Jandreau becomes ‘Brady Blackburn’; his real-life sister, fifteen-year-old Lilly Jandreau is ‘Lilly Blackburn’ and his father Tim Jandreau takes the role of self-destructive patriarch Wayne. Brady’s friends play themselves; The Rider’s best scenes feature Brady with his best friend, Lane Scott, a former bull rider now fully paralysed from a car crash.
Despite his hopes for a quick and triumphant return, Brady Blackburn finds that his accident has left him with partial seizure that will, without warning, send his right hand into a tightly-wounded clenched fist. It’s an irritating inconvenience to most people, but a matter of life and death for a high-flying bronco rider. Nevertheless he pushes on, ignoring his injury while training horses, and remaining coy with his friends about when he’ll return to the rodeo ring. It appears that every cowboy has had a brush with bodily horror. Huddled around an evening campfire, Brady’s friends remind him of their own past injuries: broken ribs; broken arms; multiple concussions, stomped-on heads. All of them have somehow made their way back to bronco-riding glory. “I just have some healing up to do” becomes Brady’s evasive refrain.
Yet all the spilled blood and broken bones in the world cannot compare to the frenetic, glorious festival that is rodeo night. When Brady makes his first post-injury appearance at the ring (as a spectator) the previously quiet, sleepy pace of The Rider speeds up to a high-powered, glorious buzz. The cheers of the crowd, sporadic clanging of the rodeo bell, and dizzying bucking of the horses come together to intoxicating effect and help the riders – and their captive audience – commune with something larger than themselves. Suddenly, all the life-defying, rib-cracking acts of bronco riding glory make sense. In a world that demands you covet your bare life, but does very little to help you live it fully, there is something sexy, transgressive, and undeniably exhilarating about courting death in the service of passion so strong that outsizes even your basic instincts for self-preservation. Seeing the spectacles of rodeo night, we instinctively understand why Brady Blackburn is ready to risk it all.
But any bronco rider, no matter how strong his death drive, still has to eat. The Blackburn family is strapped for cash and Brady needs to support his autistic sister Lilly, who is reluctantly growing into adolescence. Their parents aren’t quite present; their mother passed away years ago – a death that still hangs over Brady – while Wayne Blackburn, family patriarch, is wont to party away his nights at the local bar. Brady goes to the job centre and has a pained exchange with a counsellor. He doesn’t, he tells her, have a resume or a formal education. “Any previous job experience?” she asks; “Training horses”. One single conversation between horse trainer and job counsellor becomes a worldly allegory for a clash of two alien civilisations, and the struggle of grassroots communities to preserve their ways of live against the totalising march in globalised capital. Brady finally gets a janitorial job at a local supermarket, where his job involves stacking shelves, checking price tags, and cleaning up the back stockroom.
While any lesser filmmaker would portray Brady’s foray into part-time shelf stacker as a tragic downfall, Zhao makes clear that that this is not a fulsome defeat, but rather an additional detail to his resilient narrative. Brady is not ashamed about his job; he does his tasks quietly with clear-eyed lack of neuroses, stopping for a photo when a fan spots him checking prices in the deodorant aisle. But he, and the audience, acutely knows that this is not where he is supposed to be. He looks comfortable – even majestic – in his cowboy hat, button-up shirts, Wranglers and riding boots. As he changes to his (tragically hat-less) shop boy uniform, cleaned up in a Dakotamart polo shirt and standard cotton black trousers, he looks out of place, alien: like a rodeo-ring native playing late-capitalist dress-up.
Reflecting on what inspired her to make The Rider, Zhao told Vanity Fair:
A lot of sports movies are about people who, in the end, win the game. In the case of rodeo and Brady, the chance of him returning is very slim. But not a day goes by that this man has given up on the rodeo or continued to live in a way where he could be close to these animals. I really wanted to make a film that celebrates that, celebrates those who stay on the reservation, who make the tough choices in life, who keep going. I don’t think our culture celebrates that enough.
Our culture has a pathological myopia when it comes to deciding what’s worthy of celebration; it can seem like nothing short of an absolute, Oscar-worthy transcendental victory deserves our attention. The truth is much more boring, and more complicated. We work on our creative projects at night, weary from our full-time jobs; live on shoestring budgets cobbled together from freelance projects; find joy in our friendships and families in our own forms of natural dress once we’ve shed our uncomfortable work-friendly pantsuits. In spite of all the limitations of our world – the need to pay the rent, the inevitable degradation of our bodies, the world’s blatant disregard for work that doesn’t translate to immediate material profit – we still find a way to live. The beauty of Zhao’s film is that it celebrates being human without veering into sentimentality; it offers a clear-eyed gaze into the carelessness of our world without leaving us hopeless. It’s rare to leave a cinema feeling deeply moved about the mere fact of being alive: The Rider is the reminder that our dreams, despite it all, are valid.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and tweets at @becbecliuliu
