It will be appealing, though, partly because of the gray-brown mustang with a dark mane and tail that is being rounded up as the story opens, a helicopter swooping overhead like an aerial cowboy. The mustang is part of a feral herd that’s been captured for a rehabilitation program meant to keep the animal population humanely in check while helping prisoners like Roman (Flemish actor Matthias Schoenaerts) reintegrate into society. The men gentle the horses, and they, in turn, gentle the men. That’s the optimistic idea, at any rate, as well as the bold, obvious metaphor that shapes this seemingly impossible, seductively heartfelt male melodrama.
It shouldn’t work — none of it — not the metaphor, not the wild horse, not what it all means for the wild man at the center. It does. That’s partly because redemption stories exert their own magnetic pull but also because French director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre goes all in, embracing simplicity and sincerity without hesitation or self-consciousness. (She shares script credit with Mona Fastvold and Brock Norman Brock.) “The Mustang” is direct and almost perilously familiar — it draws from both westerns and prison movies — yet it is also attractively filigreed with surprising faces, unusual genre notes and luminous, evanescent beauty.
The story tracks Roman as he reluctantly joins the rehab program (his resistance being a narrative given), goaded by his unfailingly patient psychologist-counselor (Connie Britton). The program is run by another professional instigator, Myles, a classically cantankerous old man with a hard crust and 24-karat core who once upon a time would have been played by a grumbling, muttering Walter Brennan. The patent now belongs to Bruce Dern, who grumbles and mutters and squints into the sun in a performance that is as recognizable as the cover of a favorite song. You know every beat and lyric, and it’s pleasurable to watch Dern interpret each one anew.
There’s no John Wayne, the sun around which Brennan sometimes orbited. Even so, Schoenaerts here brings to mind one of those Wayne swaggerers, the kind who tower over movies and other men. Schoenaerts — who excels at hard-body men who yield, to hurt, tenderness and love — affects a slight bob and weave, suggesting a life in the ring. Unexpectedly, Roman often seems beaten down. He has the hunched shoulders and bowed head of the defeated, though sometimes he looks like a boxer heading into the next fight. Even a bowed head can carry a threat, as everything that we have been taught about men and violence reminds us.
By the time the mustang arrives, Roman is about halfway through his 11-year sentence. Theirs isn’t an easy match, partly because it verges on a romantic meet cute that strains narrative credulity and your tolerance for stacked decks. The horse, locked in a shed, is furiously kicking, pounding out a rhythmic SOS that the curious Roman answers. Soon, the two are warily circling each other in a corral under the tutelage of Henry (winning Jason Mitchell), one of the program’s successes. Roman and the horse — he names him Marquis, pronouncing it Marcus — don’t take to each other, but after a brutal exchange and some more time in solitary for both, they reach an understanding that opens into love.
Now and again, a European filmmaker heads to the American West to re-explore (and of course reconquer) it, often to grim and grimly obvious ends. De Clermont-Tonnerre, by contrast, takes on the western as a milieu and a genre with an appreciable lack of cynicism. Some of her storytelling can be shaky. A predictable death and a resentful teenage daughter (a fine Gideon Adlon) nearly help push the story over the melodramatic edge; and a drug subplot with its easily breached medicine cabinet is distracting.
Yet de Clermont-Tonnerre has an eye for beauty, for swirling dust and resonant silences, and she taps into the soul of this place and its inhabitants even as she reminds you of its terrors. Like Marquis, Roman can sometimes seem like too facile a symbol of the terrifyingly primitive, but he is also never less than effortlessly alive.
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“The Mustang”
Rated R. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.