A feature-length documentary about the cowboy icon, including who gets to claim it, and how communities embody it.
TAKING THE REINS is a feature-length documentary that examines the unique figure of the “cowboy” in America’s popular imagination, exploring the ways in which marginalized Americans, often cast out of national narratives, are reinventing and redeploying performances of “cowboy” to demand inclusion in our country’s story. With “Yellowstone” and its offshoots topping streamers’ ratings charts, Beyonce’s recent achievement as the first Black woman to reach #1 on Billboard’s country chart with her song “Texas Hold `Em,” her album Cowboy Carter claiming the record for most daily Spotify streams so far this year, and the recent blockbuster, BARBIE–whose central imagery is based on cowboy iconography as the quintessential representation of American identity–the cowboy has an indisputably strong a hold as ever on our nation’s imagination. From a queer rodeo in Texas, to a Black horse ranch in Compton, to a woman who reenacts Calamity Jane for tourists, our film explores the enduring hold the cowboy archetype has on our culture, its complex dimensions, and its reclamation by communities to whom it originally belonged.
