The Rider rewards viewers drawn to films that blur the line between documentary and drama, and who don't need incident to feel invested.
Written and directed by Chloé Zhao, it follows Brady Jandreau, a young Lakota rodeo rider and horse trainer on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, as he weighs whether to return to the ring after a head injury. The film's texture comes from its cast: Brady plays a version of himself, and his real father Tim and his sister Lilly, who has autism, appear as his family.
The film arrived with strong credentials and a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, winning the Art Cinema Award at Cannes' Directors' Fortnight in 2017 and later taking Best Picture from the National Society of Film Critics and a Top Ten Independent Films spot from the National Board of Review, plus a Gotham Award for Best Feature. It still gets overshadowed because Chloé Zhao's name became widely known only after Nomadland won Best Picture in 2021, and again when she moved to Marvel's Eternals; The Rider is the film she made before any of that, financed on cinematographer Joshua James Richards's credit cards with a six-person crew.
What makes it distinct is its docufiction method: Zhao met Brady Jandreau in 2014 while revisiting Pine Ridge, where she'd shot her first feature, and began writing around his life. When he suffered a real, near-fatal riding accident in 2016, she rebuilt the script to include it, then cast his actual family and friends, including fellow rider Lane Scott, paralyzed after his own accident, to play versions of themselves. Richards's natural-light photography of the badlands gives the film a plain-spoken visual register that never over-dramatizes what it's showing.
Barack Obama named it among his favorite films of 2018, and it has quietly become the reference point for everything Zhao did next. For anyone who liked the patient, character-first approach of Nomadland and wants to see where her method started, this is a 103-minute drama-western worth setting aside deliberately.
