The Rider

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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When is documentary a feature film? That not-quite-one, not-quite-the-other status is usually called a docudrama.

But it gets even more complex when you use the real people to tell the story.

Clint Eastwood kinda did that with his recent film, “The 15:17 to Paris.” There, he used the three Americans who tackled a terrorist on a French train to recount the actual event. It worked fairly well.

Now we have “The Rider,” a film by Chloé Zhao. Zhao wrote, produced, and directed this beautifully made cinematic outing that she describes as “fact based.”

Film critics might call it neo-realism.

Zhao used three family members (Brady Jandreau, Tim Jandreau, and Lilly Jandreau) to play thinly disguised versions of themselves – here called Brady Blackburn, Wayne Blackburn, and Lilly Blackburn. Cat Clifford plays Cat Clifford. And Lane Scott plays Lane Scott.

She gives us the touching story of a young cowboy who returns home to South Dakota after a tragic accident puts an end to his career on the rodeo circuit. What’s Brady to do now that his competitive days are behind him?

“Play the cards you are dealt,” advises his stern father. “Let it go.”

Yet Brady can’t see himself working in a supermarket or sitting in a trailer eating rabbit stew with his family while life goes on around him.

Instead, he relaxes around a campfire, listening to his autistic sister sing, while contemplating his next move. Despite the doctor’s warning that he can’t afford to get back on a horse, he can’t imagine his life without a horse. After all, he’s a rider.

The story is raw and painful, told in up-close shots of weathered faces and broad panoramas of the magnificent western landscape. If the film seems honest and true, maybe that’s because it is real – or almost so.

“The Rider” is currently staying in the saddle at Tropic Cinema.

At first take, you think Chloé Zhao (né Zhao Ting) has done it the hard way: A Beijing-born filmmaker choosing to make a Western set in the Dakota badlands. And using untrained actors.

But she had a head start.

Now residing in California, the 36-year-old graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, is best known for her earlier film, “Songs My Brothers Taught Me.” Set on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the drama explored the bond between a Lakota Sioux and his younger sister.

While making “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” she met Brady Jandreau, then a rising young star on the rodeo circuit.

Brady was teaching her how to ride a horse when a car accident left him with a life-threating head injury. Impressed by his determination to recover his self-identity and ability to ride, she decided to base the script for her next film on his story.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com