My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

A battered rodeo bull rider (Scott Glenn) returns to his hometown in Oklahoma and tries to settle down, removing his father (Ben Johnson) from an old folks home, despite the objections of his sister (Tess Harper), and resuming a relationship with his high school girlfriend (Kate Capshaw), now a widow with two kids. Most of this is very familiar stuff, with rodeo sequences serving as the story’s bookends, but some of the performanceswhich also include turns from Gary Busey, Mickey Rooney, Clarence Williams III, and Balthazar Gettykeep it moderately watchable if your expectations aren’t too high. Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke, The Pope of Greenwich Village) directed from a script by novelist and songwriter Joel Don Humphreys, with location cinematography by Bernd Heinl. (JR)

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