Some Real Cowgirl Sh*t

The “neo-Western” shares aesthetic traits with its Hollywood predecessor, from horses and wide-open spaces to wistfulness bittersweet. But where the classic Western features gunslingers, old saloons and towns never big enough for two, its modern descendent has broken from tradition in recent years — so much that calling it a Western at all feels like a misnomer. If anything, it’s a corrective to the genre’s mythmaking, told in naturalistic hues that blur the boundaries of drama and documentary. Such is the case in Kate Beecroft’s “East of Wall,” which not only reflects a century-old cinematic history, but inserts itself into the docu-fiction contemporary Western subgenre pioneered by Chloé Zhao a decade ago.

“East of Wall” is a mournful Badlands drama featuring nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves. It follows middle-aged single mother Tabatha Zimiga, who, according to Beecroft, said upon their first meeting: “Want to see some real cowgirl shit?” (at which point Beecroft knew she would be perfect for the part). The film is presented as scripted drama, but in a blending of fiction and reality, Zimiga plays a resilient South Dakota rancher sheltering nearly a dozen wayward teens who assist her in training (or “breaking”) and selling horses. She recently lost her husband John — father to her two children and a paternal figure to her many wards — and as the anniversary of his death approaches, the found family’s legal and financial troubles exacerbate unresolved tensions surrounding his death.

The tale is sketched from the real-life passing of Zimiga’s husband, John Neumann, and follows her struggles to keep his family’s century-old homesteader traditions alive. Tabatha’s teens (most of them girls) sport half-shaven heads as part of a warrior’s code, which — along with the numerous Native American supporting cast — imbues the film with a subversive sensibility. It’s a Western, yes, but told from the outside in, through the eyes of people often villainized by the genre or kept in its margins.

The movie’s opening moments reenforce this modernization, drawing the viewer in with vertical TikTok videos of horses charging across plains (taken from the teens’ actual profiles). The soundtrack of alt-rock and country hip-hop artists like Shaboozey departs from the nostalgic strings and harmonicas of traditional Westerns and feels sonically at home within Beecroft’s roving, naturalistic frames as an extension of the young characters’ personal playlists.

Zhao’s work looms large over “East of Wall,” down to casting South Dakota newcomers as versions of themselves. The first and most obvious comparison is “The Rider,” Zhao’s moving 2017 rodeo saga about an injured Native horse rider getting back in the saddle one last time. But a more fitting sister film to “East of Wall” may actually be “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” Zhao’s reality-adjacent debut about numerous Native half-siblings coming together in the wake of their father’s death. That film — about a man who raised some of his children but remained a distant stranger to others — is a concise metaphor for the dueling ways many modern Native youths view their connection to the contemporary U.S., depending on whether their needs are met, or whether they were left behind. In “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” and “East of Wall,” form closely follows function; the camera explores the drama connecting each character to their land through hardship. For Tabatha and her kids, that means scrounging together cash not only in the absence of state assistance, but in the face of the state’s inspections, and its insistence that she meet an arbitrary standard of care.

What makes both aforementioned movies “Westerns” isn’t just their superficial cues, but the ways in which they reflect modern America. The notion of literal, lineal inheritance (of land, and money) becomes tied to the greater idea of where these characters stand in the hierarchy of the modern United States. They are forgotten, and scattered, left to fend for themselves despite fitting what was once a quintessentially American image, of dream-makers taming the wilderness. Tabatha’s trials involve not only keeping her kids under one roof, but keeping them together, as a predatory businessman (Scoot McNairy) swoops in to train her daughter and buy the family’s ranch out from under them.

In an intriguing flourish, the movie seldom clarifies which teen characters are Tabatha’s biological children, and which of them she’s unofficially adopted — a legal hurdle we see her try to cross on screen. To most viewers, this might come off as confusing, but it feels intentional on Beecroft’s part. The movie, at one point, cuts away as soon as she starts to explain it to a judge, a way of telling us: the distinction doesn’t matter. In “East of Wall,” the ideas of family and inheritance are gradually divorced from the patrilineal traditions of the nuclear family — the ostensible backbone of WASP America — in favor of a more tribal, community-centric vision society.

This world is hardly utopian, and the festering wounds of grief persist. And while Beecroft’s drama occasionally depends too heavily on dialogue, her engaging textural approach — one of documentarian cinéma verité — further catalyzes a genre in a state of metamorphosis, throwing off the shackles of narrative and formal cliché in favor of psychological exploration. The western has long been America’s soul. With their roving snapshots of the people the “new West” has left behind, Beecroft and Zhao lay it bare.