Only when driving the cowboy is not alone

One with the horse and nature: Brady Jandreau plays a slightly romanticized version of himself (Photo: Cineworx)

When a horse is injured can not do it anymore what he wants, you give him the pity. The Lakota release him from the inevitable bondage. Young cowboy Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) is seriously injured at the rodeo and since then he has a metal plate in his head. "Because I'm human, I was allowed to live," he explains to his younger sister Lilly (Lilly Jandreau).

What makes a man? Nothing less than what Chloe Zhao asks in "The Rider". After his first film "Songs My Brother M" learned about a Lakota brother, the second feature film of Chinese plays in the Pine Ridge Preserve in South Dakota, one of the poorest areas of the states United States

But if Brady is no longer a horse trainer Working and participating in rodeos, his family will not only lose a much-needed source of income. Brady threatens to lose his rider identity

All amateur actors, believable and intense

This may seem corny, but it is not the case. Brady Blackburn's biography is that of Brady Jandreau, 20, a descendant of Lakota-Sioux. Zhao's story tells a story about some changes; how Brady's dreams were about to dissipate after the rodeo crash. Even the disillusioned father Tim Jandreau aka Wayne Blackburn, the slightly mentally retarded sister and Brady 's friends play with enough space to improvise slightly novel versions of themselves.

In Brady's Spartan Room there is a bed and a dresser; on him a book – "Holy Spirituals" -, studs, badges of his rodeo success in the form of curls and a revolver.

Feel the wind blowing in the grass, ride in the meadow, ride horses, that's all the boys want. Then Brady ignores the fits in his hand and, as soon as some hair has grown on the big scar on his head, resumes his work with wild horses. He is known not only as a rodeo rider on the way to the summit, but also as a "horse whisperer".

Renunciation of artificial exaggeration

Why is "The Rider" so special? Look at Brady Jandreau's face. There is an unfathomable depth and suffering that he does not even have to articulate. It is a pain that turns inward and rarely adventure in aggression: against the father who plays or drinks money, or when he protects his sister.

It seems that all the melancholy of the Indians today To manifest life in this face. Just like beauty: the freedom experienced in this breathtaking landscape of the Great Plains, which is limited only by poverty and lack of perspective; the deep connection with nature and the beliefs and myths of the ancestors, which belong so naturally to the lives of boys.

This landscape puts Zhao in a grandiose scene. Grand, because it does not exaggerate artificially, but shows them in normal light and in removed colors. The portrayal of Brady's relationship with his father and sister also reveals great honesty and beauty. And to best friend and former rodeo star Lane Scott, who has been physically disabled since an accident. There are tensions, but not black and white.

The Fragile Dream of Freedom

Brady has to choose – completely rejected on the existential – when he is ready, all that matters to him and what makes him, sacrifice for his health. For a long life maybe, but is it worth living? Phrases like "I will not finish like you", addressed to the Father, or "Do not give up on your dreams", would not have been necessary.

"The Rider" is a slow tour of a fragile dream of life in Liberty and independence between tradition and modernity.