Quiet and moody, The Rider is a remarkable visual poem that reveals its story through the accumulation of small details. The protagonist, Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau), is an ill-looking young man gulping down a fistful of pills and picking at the bandage on his head. He has a metal plate in his skull, lives on a vast plain under a big sky and tries—and fails—to lasso a dummy bull. He’s just out of the hospital. He’s a rodeo rider who has had a serious fall.
Directed by Chloé Zhao, Chinese born but residing in the U.S., The Rider is set on the Lakota Sioux reservation. It’s a country of big hats, open spaces, wild horses and—for fun on Saturday night—the rodeo. Poverty and social problems are the shadows at the margin. The repo man wants the trailer where Brady lives with his developmentally disabled kid sister and his father, who drinks and gambles away what little money they have at the casino. Riding a bucking bronco is Brady’s hoop dream.
The Rider has many arresting scenes, including Brady’s visit to the grave of his mother, its marker rising above a field of tall but stingy grass whispering in the wind, and the many episodes under the pale moon of an endless sky unsmudged by the electric lights of civilization. Brady is featured often in close-ups, downcast and worried by the nurse’s assertion that he should never ride again. The Rider is less about the sport of rodeo than the camaraderie of men drawn together by the adventure of an experience where every second is a gamble.
