Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bull’ on Hulu, a Quietly Extraordinary Drama About an Unusual Friendship

Bull arrives on Hulu with the typically invisible wave of critical acclaim many indie dramas are saddled with: Effusive reviews stemming from a Cannes Film Festival debut, a quick theatrical run in a few big markets (this one was scuttled by the COVID-19 lockdown), then getting utterly lost among the nigh-impenetrable miasma of streaming offerings. It’s an unfortunate recipe for obscurity, a fate that an extraordinary movie like Bull doesn’t deserve. So hey, review spoiler alert, don’t skip this one.

BULL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Rural Texas. Fourteen-year-old Kris (Amber Havard) pulls her dog off a dead chicken. She shoos her younger sister away from the carcass, wraps it in a plastic bag and tosses it over a fence. She walks by her neighbor Abe’s (Rob Morgan) house, and he admonishes her: Keep that dog tied up and away from the chickens, or he’ll get out his rifle. She shrugs him off. Kris and her sister live with their grandmother, and visit their mom in prison. Kris is chastised by her grandmother for fighting in school, but her mother defends her right to not be pushed around (“Sometimes you just gotta show you’re crazy,” Mom says). With an air of passivity that seems like a cover for her inner turmoil, the teen walks through life with an unspoken, possibly unacknowledged and unaware sense of fatalism, that she’ll end up just like her mother.

Abe, meanwhile, treks to San Antonio for a Professional Bull Riders rodeo. A former local-star rider, he suits up in a padded vest as a bullfighter, one of the men in the arena who distracts the bull from the cowboy after he falls off. The job allows him to pay his bills, and, to look at his hardscrabble neighborhood and battered pickup truck, things are probably tight. He coasts a little on the fumes of his past success — but he’s also one step above being the rodeo clown, an affront to his well-honed and intuitive ability to tame riled-up steer by placing his hand on its forehead (which reminded me of the eye-opening Shark Week documentary about the diver who could put a gigantic great white in a mellow, trancelike state by stroking a specific area on its snout). Abe is a tough, prideful man. But he’s firmly middle-aged and walks stiffly, permanently limping, the result of a long, hard career. He seems to be one of the rare Black men who crossed over to the big-time, mostly white rodeo scene.

Pressured by her friends to rustle up some booze, Kris wanders by Abe’s empty house, kicks over a potted plant and finds a key. Abe’s always gone on the weekends. She lets herself in, finds his liquor cabinet and invites the rowdies over to party. They trash the place. Abe hobbles in the next morning, chasing teenagers out of his yard, and finds Kris fleeing the scene. He calls the cops; Grandma convinces him to go easy, and Kris will make it up to him. He puts her to task cleaning up, doing chores and, eventually, hauling water for the young Black men he’s training to ride bulls. It becomes an unusual friendship — maybe they need each other, and don’t quite realize it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bull has a quiet, observational simmer that brings to mind Kelly Reichardt’s films; the Kris character could be lifted from the background extras in Wendy and Lucy or Certain Women. Abe’s arc, meanwhile, is a blend of Chloe Zhao’s exquisite rodeo drama The Rider and the character-reclamation story of The Wrestler. Finally, the dynamic between characters could be a cleaner, significantly quieter distillation of the Samuel L. Jackson-Christina Ricci interplay in Black Snake Moan.

Performance Worth Watching: Morgan is extraordinary as an old man in a young man’s profession, staring down the barrel of obsolescence. He and Havard share an understated, but substantial chemistry that significantly deepens and enriches the film.

Memorable Dialogue: In a film that avoids phony displays of affection between its characters, Abe sums up Kris with a fitting compliment: “You’re stubborn as shit, girl. You’re like a goddamn flea. You get flicked off, you get back on.”

Sex and Skin: One troublingly unassuming scene of sexual assault among teens.

Our Take: Bull is director Annie Silverstein’s feature-length debut, and it’s a quiet stunner. Her handheld camera shakes with restless agitation early on, but soon settles down as Kris and Abe establish some common ground. Not that their bond is ever spoken outright — the film has no use for demonstrative displays. The two protagonists carry their emotions quietly within and let their actions speak for their mutual concern, their shared feelings of isolation and interpersonal struggle. This is precisely how character dramas can ascribe to show-don’t-tell storytelling practices, and the director assuredly maintains an understated tone that immerses us fully in this world — a world we’re reluctant to leave behind when the final credits run.

Silverstein and cinematographer Shabier Kirchner establish a tactile sense of setting and socioeconomic hardship purely through visual detail — scratchy and unkempt yards, muddy creeks, weathered ranches. There’s a clear, but never overstated racial divide, too, as Abe earns money at primarily white rodeos, and rests easy among the Black community at its own rodeos, where he works just for fun (or quite possibly out of compulsion). It makes the Abe-Kris friendship that much more stark, unusual and powerful; he takes her to the Black rodeos, and as he drinks and barbecues with old friends, she makes new friends and watches her little sister shriek with glee as she plays with other children. And maybe she wants to try riding a bull herself.

Both characters are at personal crossroads — Kris wonders if she’d fit in better in juvie, and Abe’s in the middle of a midlife identity crisis. In an unusual twist, one of their commonalities is drugs. He needs painkillers for a lifetime of scars, breaks and bruises, and when he feels palpably aged out of his line of work, he instinctively hits the bottle. Her peer group absolutely puts her on her mother’s path; she’s persuaded by her mother’s friend — white, male, friendly veneer, highly toxic — to sell baggies full of oxycontin, and the rodeo circuit just might be the perfect avenue. They both have metaphorical bulls to ride and tame. And dammit, they better make the right decisions.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Bull is a beautiful and complex movie about two people finding each other and needing each other amidst a storm of sexual, racial and economic politics. It’s disarming and unflinchingly humane.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Bull on Hulu