Songs My Brothers Taught Me movie review (2016)

Chloe Zhao’s “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” would earn a prime spot on the Malick Network (though not, ironically, on BLTV: though set in the Badlands of South Dakota, it doesn’t concern lovers-on-the-lam). It also has another, somewhat overlapping pedigree. A product of the Sundance Labs and their dedication to fostering movies about Native American culture, it is an earnest, smartly mounted film about life on a present-day reservation. If the Malick and Sundance influences combined lead you to expect a work that’s stronger aesthetically and ethnographically than dramatically, then you won’t be surprised by “Songs My Brothers Taught Me.” 

The character whose voice-overs begin and end the film, Johnny (John Reddy), is a handsome, muscular Lakota high school senior who’s itching to leave the dreary confines of reservation life and move to Los Angeles. We first see him riding a horse and pensively musing on how it’s necessary to leave some of the wildness in such an animal, which needs that edge to survive. Thankfully, the metaphorical obviousness here doesn’t continue, as Zhao quickly settles into a nuanced, unhurried look at the life Johnny wants to escape.

The boy’s most crucial relationship is with his younger sister, Jashaun (Jashaun St. John), who looks to him for the understanding and emotional support she doesn’t find elsewhere. The two live with their erratic, troubled mom (Irene Bedard), who tries to urge the comfort she finds in religion on an older son who’s in prison.

Johnny’s inclination to strike out in the wider world comes at a difficult emotional moment for his family. Not long after we meet them, he, sis and mom learn that the kids’ father, a rodeo cowboy who fathered 25 children by nine “so-called wives,” has burned to death in his home. This news not only shocks and saddens them, and introduces a soft note of mystery, it also suggests the precariousness of life on the Pine Ridge reservation.