Film

The Rider

The Rider is Chloé Zhao's docufiction western, built around real-life rodeo rider Brady Jandreau playing a version of his own life after a near-fatal head injury. It's slow, sun-bleached, and unusually tender toward men and horses alike — more interested in gesture and silence than plot. For anyone who loves a patient character study over spectacle, this one aches quietly and stays with you.

TMDb rating7.3

If you liked this

Nomadland2021

Chloé Zhao's next film uses the same trick — casting real people to half-play their own lives — this time following a widow drifting across the American West in a van. Same tenderness, same eye for dignity in hard work.

But It trades Brady's physical stakes for something even more meditative; if you wanted more plot, this has less.

Nomadland poster

Lean on Pete2018

A teenage boy and a broken-down racehorse cross the West together, and the film has the same unhurried patience with animals, poverty and male tenderness that makes Brady's story land.

But It's bleaker in places, with no rodeo glamour to soften the hardship — just a long, sad walk toward adulthood.

Lean on Pete poster

Winter's Bone2010

Debra Granik's Ozark drama shares The Rider's DNA: nonprofessional actors, real communities, and a young person forced to become the adult in the room while the landscape does half the storytelling.

But It's colder and more menacing — a thriller undercurrent replaces Brady's gentleness with real danger.

Winter's Bone poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Buck2011

Buck Brannaman, the real horse whisperer this world descends from, is essentially the older, whole version of Brady — and Zhao has cited him as an influence. This is what his quiet mastery looks like unscripted.

The real deal: a Sundance-winning documentary about the horse trainer whose gentle, almost telepathic methods echo through Brady's own hands. No actors, no imposed arc — just a man who turned a broken childhood into extraordinary patience with animals.

But It's a straight documentary with talking heads and horse clinics — if you came to The Rider for cinema, this feels more like a very good profile piece.

Buck poster
More like this (8)

Wendy and Lucy2008

Kelly Reichardt's tiny, devastating film about a woman and her dog stranded in Oregon has the same faith that quietly watching someone cope is enough to build a movie around.

But Almost nothing happens by design — if The Rider's slowness tested you, this asks for even more patience.

Wendy and Lucy poster

The Wrestler2008

Swap the horse for a wrestling ring and Brady for Mickey Rourke's washed-up Randy 'The Ram,' and you get the same question: who are you when the thing that made you a man is taken away?

But It's grimier and sadder, with none of the open-sky beauty — this one happens in strip malls and gyms.

The Wrestler poster

Brokeback Mountain2005

Another cowboy film obsessed with what masculinity costs, set against wide unforgiving landscapes, and unafraid to let silence and repression do the emotional heavy lifting.

But The central relationship gives it a very different engine — this is a love story first, a Western second.

Brokeback Mountain poster

Meek's Cutoff2011

Reichardt again, this time an 1845 wagon-train western that strips the genre down to dust, exhaustion and hard choices — a good chaser if you loved how unglamorous The Rider's West felt.

But It's slower still, with no resolution, no comfort, no rousing score — pure endurance cinema.

Meek's Cutoff poster

Manchester by the Sea2016

A different kind of American man going quiet with grief, set in a wintry New England instead of the badlands, but with the same interest in what stoicism costs a person over time.

But It's talkier and more urban, trading Brady's physical world for one of family arguments and old wounds.

Manchester by the Sea poster

Hell or High Water2016

A modern Texas western about brothers robbing banks to save the family land — same dying-cowboy-economy backdrop, same sense that the West doesn't have room for men like this anymore.

But It's a genre thriller at heart, with chases and shootouts The Rider never needed.

Hell or High Water poster

Junior Bonner1972no page yet

Same premise decades earlier: a rodeo rider whose body and era are both running out, filmed by Sam Peckinpah with none of his usual violence — just melancholy about a vanishing American masculinity.

Steve McQueen plays an aging bronc rider returning to a hometown and family that no longer have use for cowboys — the elegiac, sun-bleached tone Zhao's film echoes fifty years later.

But It's a studio picture from 1972, with all the pacing and gender politics that implies — less raw, more polished heartbreak.

8 Seconds1994no page yet

The same true-life subject — a young champion bull rider facing his body's limits — played completely straight as Hollywood melodrama, which shows just how unusual Zhao's restraint really is by contrast.

A glossy, unabashedly sentimental biopic of real bull-riding champion Lane Frost, complete with swelling strings and tragic romance — good, trashy fun if you want the same world with the volume turned all the way up.

But It's shameless where The Rider is careful — expect melodrama, not mood, and a script that spells out everything Zhao leaves unsaid.

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Recommended by

Minari, The Searchers, Nomadland, The Florida Project, Wendy and Lucy, Meek's Cutoff, Lean on Pete, Sweetgrass, Certain Women, My Darling Clementine, First Cow