Review of The Rider (2018) by V H — 27 Jul 2018

Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) is a young rodeo star living in South Dakota with his father and autistic teenage sister. When we first see him, he's just returned home after checking himself out of the hospital and is in the process of pulling staples from his skull. We soon learn that they're the result of a horrific rodeo accident in which a horse stepped on his head cracking it open and exposing his brain. To make matters worse, all sorts of muck got ground into the wound. Luckily the doctors were able to put him into a medically-induced coma, fix him up, and insert a steel plate, and now he's as good as new.

Actually, he's NOT as good as new, but he's having a really hard time coming to grips with this fact. In reality, the doctor told him that it's too dangerous for him to ever ride again, a fact he keeps to himself. He has regular episodes where one of his hands seizes up into a tight fist and he can't release it but he hides this from his friends, who can't wait for him to get back on the horse (literally) and join them in the ring.

In the meantime, Brady gets a job working in the grocery store telling everyone (and himself) it's only until he finishes healing. In one of the movie's more poignant moments, a couple of young fans spot him scanning barcodes on a shelf and timidly ask their hero for an autograph. Brady plays along and tells them what they want to hear but you can tell it's eating at him.

The interesting (and initially confusing) thing about this movie is that Brady is playing a character based on his own life story but with a different last name. And his on-screen father and sister are played by his real-life father and sister. And a bunch of his movie friends are played by his real-life friends, including his best friend, Lane Scott, another former rodeo star who was paralyzed in an accident at age 19. (The real-life Lane Scott was paralyzed in a car crash; his movie doppelganger was paralyzed in a rodeo accident...see why I said it's somewhat confusing?).

Another thing about this movie I didn't know until afterwards is that Brady and his family and friends are members of the Lakota tribe. They occasionally make gestures to the sky and say things that sound sort of like prayers, but I assumed it was some sort of rodeo thing.

The main gripe one might have with this movie is that rodeos are cruel to animals and dangerous for the riders, but whether you like them or not, they're a real part of the culture in cowboy country and the movie makes no attempt to glamorize them. In a scene that couldn't have possibly been staged, Brady is shown to be a gentle and talented horse trainer, "breaking" a wild horse with little more than patience and soft words. There is no question that he loves and respects animals.

Cowboys and rodeos are way down on my list of things I'd like to see movies about but I'm glad I broke out of my comfort zone of documentaries and talky slice-of-life films and took a chance on "The Rider". It was well worth my time and money.