‘Broke’ Review: Wyatt Russell Shines in a Stark Rodeo-Survival Drama

More than a western, Broke is a drama set in the world of rodeos, among the people whose lives revolve around the land and its rituals. Shot in Montana, it follows a man who is physically and psychologically shattered, struggling to claw his way out of a suffocating mix of anguish and pain that never seems to let up. Carlyle Eubank’s debut feature is really split into two parallel narratives. In a way, True’s life (played by Wyatt Russell) functions as an extended flashback to a present that is even darker, closer to a survival thriller than a character study.

The film opens with a lone man wandering through a snowstorm, trying to survive the cold and the night with whatever means he has, far from anything resembling civilization. Immediately after, we see that same man—True—clean-shaven and looking healthier, riding in a rodeo. He’s violently thrown off a bronc after only a few seconds, left battered and dazed. In this sparse, mostly wordless film, we gradually learn that this is his life: he rides for a living, deals with chronic pain and dizzy spells, abuses painkillers he buys illegally, and has little sense of where he’s headed.

His parents (veterans Dennis Quaid and Mary McDonnell) beg him to get his life together—either work with them on the ranch or enlist in the Marines—but True wants nothing to do with any of that. He spends his free time with his younger brother (Johnny Berchtold) or sketching remarkably good drawings that he immediately dismisses. Between bouts of nausea, pills, and more rodeos, True meets Ali (Auden Thornton), a nurse. They fall in love, and for a moment it seems to bring out the best in him, but his addictions and his compulsion to keep riding—even after doctors warn him it’s dangerous—soon put that relationship at risk too.

As this story unfolds, the film keeps cutting back to True’s battle for survival in the snow. Watching him try to make his way back to civilization without losing fingers or worse, we can’t help but wonder how he ended up there in the first place. That, I imagine, is exactly what Eubank wants the audience to ponder. And in its own way, it works. It’s a structure that belongs more to a thriller than a drama, but one that creates a steady undercurrent of unease as we follow True—a man whose life is neither especially exciting nor shaped like a conventional adventure or suspense narrative.

Beyond that unusual structure, Broke is at heart a drama about a man in crisis, sinking into a personal and then familial spiral that tightens around him more and more. The film doesn’t provide explanations or backstory to justify his condition; it avoids psychoanalyzing him. Is it his battered body that’s pulling him under? Or something deeper? Ali’s arrival seems to pull him out of that hole for a while, but at some point he realizes that the most important bond in his life may not be with her—it might be with his horse, Dude.

It’s true that the film leans, maybe a bit too heavily, into the myth of the suffering cowboy, helped along by its mournful country soundtrack (featuring Steve Earle, Brent Cobb, Charley Crockett, Merle Haggard, and Tyler Childers, among others). But what could have been a pile of clichés is saved by Russell’s restrained, nuanced performance. In the snowbound scenes he even resembles his father, Kurt, in The Thing—almost uncannily so. Thanks to Russell’s physical and emotional commitment, Eubank avoids over-romanticizing the character and preserves both his credibility and his quiet force all the way to the end.

Broke won’t go down in history, but it deserves far more attention than the tiny amount it received in U.S. theaters and on streaming. It’s a small film—human, sensitive, and quietly painful—that hits harder than many larger, more publicized productions.