Acowboykeepsonkeepingon

falls off his horse.” True. And Apollo 13 is about three guys’ rough commute home from work.

Beautifully shot and perfectly paced, The Rider also balances precisely atop the fiction/documentary divide. The screenplay is by Zhao but the characters, including rodeo rider Brady, his gruff father and his autistic sister, are drawn from real life. In fact, Zhao met Brady while researching her first film, 2015’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me, and decided to craft her next one around him.

Both the real-life Brady and the fictional one have suffered grievous head injuries from a rodeo accident. His lifestyle is not forgiving; one of his buddies sports a pros- thetic arm, while another is in hospital. (The real man was injured in a car crash; in the film we are meant to assume a rodeo mishap.) Over a fireside chat and a beer, a third remarks of his concussions: “By NFL standards I should be dead.”

But there is also great beauty in this tale, which was filmed in and around the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the South Dakota Badlands. Zhao often manages to frame a full moon in the big sky, and frequently lets the soundtrack consist of nothing more than the whisper of birdsong and breeze.

Brady is the quintessential, machismo cowboy, and yet he’s not. He’s determined to get back in the saddle, no matter what his doctors tell him. Working at a grocery store “while I’m laid up,” he at one point spins his pricing gun like a six-shooter. Out on the range, he pops off rounds from the real thing.