The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is a 3.5k sq mi parcel of land in the southwestern corner of South Dakota where it is home to just shy of 20,000 people from the Oglala tribe.  Of those, there is Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), a young man and father of two – from two different women – who struggles to find steady work on the reservation to support himself and his family.  Elsewhere, there is Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder), a young teen who is kicked out of his home by his drug user/dealer father. While the two rarely cross paths in their daily lives, their stories and hardships are unfortunately not unique in the community. 

War Pony is the directorial debut from Riley Keough and Gina Gammell.  While filming American Honey (2016), Keough became close friends with two of the extras, Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy, and together with Gammell, the crew wrote this tale of wayward youth based on the life experiences of Bob and Reddy.  It premiered at the 2022 edition of Cannes where it was featured Un Certain Regard and additionally won the Golden Camera Award.  The 115-minute drama continued to pick up positive buzz across the festival circuit before its release by Momentum Pictures. 

The film is billed as an intertwined coming-of-age story, and to a degree that is true, but for much of the film Bill and Matho are leading their own independent stories.  Shot on location with a cast of first-time actors, it lends a certain authenticity to the film, but there are also scenes where the lack of training does make the otherwise polished film feel more like a student affair.  These instances are just fleeting moments that stand out only because Whiting and Crazy Thunder give such strong performances in the film that the few moments of warming up to the camera lens feel bigger than they are. Neither have easy roles – Bill having to balance the tone of the film and Matho being put through an absolutely relentless spiral of abuse – but through a vigorous rehearsal process, Keough and Gammell were able to guide the two boys and the entire expanded cast to deliver incredibly nuanced performances. 

War Pony wisely skirts away from the notion of being just a work of poverty porn and is reminiscent of the care and compassion shown in Chloé Zhao’s catalog – surprisingly, it feels more structurally like Nomadland (2020) than Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) – while finding the tonal balance that Sean Baker perfected in Red Rocket (2021). Bill is written with all the resiliency of Wile E. Coyote in that he travels his arc in the film one step forward and two steps back. He takes every interaction with someone as an opportunity to hustle, not because he is looking to shake some money off people, but because when even the convenience store is not willing to hire him, how else is he supposed to get money to support himself and his kids if not through alternative means. This results in a hair-brained plot to breed a poodle so he can sell the puppies for thousands of dollars a head, but first, he needs to pool the money together to be able to buy the dog which means he must reallocate the funds intended to post his girlfriend’s bail, but with her out of the picture, he now needs to find childcare for his sons. Whiting plays Bill in such a way that even when his back is against the wall, he gets frustrated by the events but never bitter, and he never loses the charm that endears his audience to him. 

Bill splits his screentime with the younger Matho who finds himself similarly resilient, but the arc he follows does not allow for many of the same antics that Bill gets up to, though there are some moments of levity late in the film on Halloween night for the boy. Before that, however, he is kicked out of his house by his father for dipping into his stash and selling it for some quick cash. While his story is much more pointed than Bill’s – the actual eviction scene is one of the most horrifying and upsetting sequences in the film – the exchange of the boys haggling price with a buyer for what is left in the baggie does elicit some chuckles and is proof that Matho is, deep down, a good kid in a rough situation. All around him are examples of drug addiction, violence, and alcoholism so it is natural that he tries to emulate that because, in his worldview, that is what it means to grow up and be a man. But he is still a child. His nature is further proven when he quickly apologizes for cursing at his girlfriend after she broke up with him, emulating again what he has seen but realizing it goes against the person he is and wants to be. His story is peppered with these small instances of Matho finding himself and it creates a truly heartbreaking arc to witness. Even in the safety of a foster home, he is put to work in the drug trade, and when faced with eviction there, he pleads to work for free just to keep a roof over his head.

Both boys’ arcs come to a striking and empowering conclusion that they are still proud of their heritage. War Pony opens with a scene of an older Lakota man praying in the fields beside his home. After fading to black, the film cuts to Bill, driving through the town, shirtless, and blasting rap music. The dichotomy between the two could not be more obvious, but the film is not presenting this as a shot down at the younger generations of Lakota people but rather wants to examine all of the structures which have led the community to this point. The heritage is still alive, though, seen not just through the blankets, feathers, and dream catchers that adorn the walls of the homes, but also through the actions of Bill and Matho. For Matho, it is during the funeral procession for his father after breaking a cigarette out the window of the car and calling out in unison with the other men in the procession. For Bill, the scene comes shortly after when he admits to an older couple in the community that he does not speak Lakota, a line he delivers with a twinge of pain as if he is ashamed of the confession. Later, at a Halloween party, Bill and his friends look across the room where a white man is wearing face paint, feathers, and beads. No words are exchanged, only glances, and as the camera cuts back and forth between the two, it is clear that nothing needs to be said. 

The film ends with hijinks in a riotous heist sequence organized by Bill to raid the turkey farm he was fired from and refused his last paycheck by Tim (Sprague Hollander), the owner. The whole downward slide started at the same Halloween party when Tim’s wife, Allison (Ashley Shelton), blackmails Bill with claims of sex trafficking for his help in driving the native girls Tim has been sleeping with to and from the reservation. Shelton’s role is brief in the film, but incredibly impactful as her initial introduction of just being dippy and ignorant gives way to calculated racism, accented later by Tim’s severance speech to Bill where he talks about contamination of the flock, in direct reference to the turkey but one does not need to dig deep to find a second meaning in his carefully chosen words. The community rallies behind Bill and together they lift 45 live turkeys, all the prepared meat, and countless other assets to distribute amongst the community. Playing out over Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” the film ends with all the magic of a Hallmark Christmas movie while the turkeys strut around the freshly fallen snow, but even more than the solidarity shown by the town is a subtle costume choice that links Bill and Matho: a red hoodie. Red, the color of the Pine Ridge flag, showing that Bill and Matho are Oglala Lakota. 

War Pony is an incredibly strong directorial debut from Keough and Gammell that works far better in practice than the concept sounds like it would on paper. The team was led by Bob and Reddy to the point where the writers had a version of final cut in that if the scene did not originate from them, simply put, it was not shot no matter what the production notes asked for; notably, the pair nixed the proposal for a white protagonist. The directing pair really used their platform to allow for this story to be told, so while it has all the trappings of a slice-of-life film – because, at its heart, it is a slice-of-life film – it does not feel like an act of fetishistic voyeurism. It feels true and authentic, and its painful moments do not feel exaggerated for narrative impact, but their permeance in the film makes those moments of pride and joy all the more powerful. With its list of highs and lows, War Pony is no doubt a polarizing work, but an important and empathetic work and tells a story that deserves to be heard.