War Pony

Directed by Riley Keough and Gina Gammell

Running time: 1hr55 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Jojo Bapteise Whiting in War Pony

I admit I didn’t have high expectations of War Pony, a project that appeared to bear the silky red flags of a celebrity vanity project before it debuted at Cannes last year. It marks the directorial debut of Riley Keough, in collaboration with her friend Gina Gammell: Keough, a vivid and unpredictable actor who has burned a hole in such films as American Honey and Zola, also happens to be the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, a pedigree that doesn’t establish her as the obvious teller for a coming-of-age story about marginalised young Indigenous men clawing a life for themselves in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

But not all great storytellers are obvious ones, and so it proves here. There’s an unassuming poetry and humility to Keough and Gammell’s film that doesn’t assume intimate knowledge of the lives under scrutiny. Instead, it has intense interest and compassion to offer, plus a freewheeling awareness of American history and iconography, and its distance from stern, soured reality. The filmmakers recognise that chasm without slotting themselves into it; War Pony cares for its characters without righteously campaigning for them.

Those characters are Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) and Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder), two young Lakota men at opposite ends of adolescent hell. Bill, a 23-year-old father of two, seems younger, with way too much growing up left to do; Matho is 13, with a slightly fey serenity to him, an old but perilously naive soul. Broken families are the status quo here, necessitating plucky, ill-advised survival strategies: Bill hatches a plan to breed poodles using one stray specimen, while Matho falls into meth-dealing, helping himself to a relative’s stash. The narrative is loose, the pace befitting two young men with fizzing interior desires but no particular place to go.

Co-writing with Pine Ridge residents Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy, Keough and Gammell aren’t at pains to weave Bill and Matho’s largely disparate stories together, instead alternating between them with a strolling ease; the lack of schematic design to the drama enhances the sense of two typical lives being picked for study, neither overly burdened with symbolism or representative duty; David Gallego’s limber, inquisitive cinematography likewise plays the region’s austere natural beauty and grim human clutter against each other without indulging in portentous magic-hour pictorialism. It’s a debut that reveals confidence in casualness, trusting us to intuit deeper wounds and wants in its portraiture.

WAR PONY (2022) Written by Riley Keough, Gina Gammell, Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy | Shot by David Gallego | Edited by Affonso Gonçalves and Eduardo Serrano