Once you hold your horses, you’ll understand the grief within.

What should we expect when watching “East of Wall?” We begin with a girl and her horse standing on the horizon, so you would think this is an old fashioned country movie. Think again, because then, we get to a montage of TikTok videos with rap country music playing. And in a sense, it doesn’t have to be old fashioned, but rather an examination of life in the Badlands. South Dakota to be exact.

Think back to Chloe Zhao’s feature debut “The Rider,” when a real family was used to play different characters. There was a rodeo star suffering from a near fatal head injury, his autistic sister, and their gambling addict father. And the main protagonist has to work at a grocery store to earn money to train horses. None of these people were well known movie stars, but they were universally excellent in a portrait of the life of a rodeo star. It had the look and feel of an American story.

In “East of Wall,” the two leads we don’t know yet are mother and daughter Tabatha and Portia Zimiga, who portray themselves. Tabatha is a horse trainer with tattoos and a half shaven hairstyle, who rescues horses and allows her family (consisting of kids from different families who either didn’t care or couldn’t take care of them) to use TikTok to sell them, while her daughter Portia is a rodeo star They barely have any luck succeeding in big bucks.

But there are more problems. Tabitha’s current husband John passes away, which hits hard for both her and Portia. The young lady saw her stepfather as more than a father figure, and the grief threatens to separate the two of them. In fact, there’s a campfire scene when Tabatha admits the direction of her relationship with Portia to her support group, only to scare her off when she wasn’t supposed to be there.

While we don’t get much basis out of the other youngsters, Portia also serves as the film’s narrator questioning on what life provides for her and her family. She also shares her poetry for the badlands, when it used to be flooded and consider the cracks in the dirt to be scars (“John said: This is what the bottom of the ocean must look like,” she says). She might even consider that the same thing will happen between her and her mother.

There are some well known stars in this movie, and they aren’t excuses for Sony Pictures Classics to release it. Scoot McNairy plays the wealthy horse trainer Roy Waters, who wants to buy Tabatha’s land, and allows her family to stay, but they would have to work for him. And plus, we get Jennifer Ehle as Tabatha’s moonshine-making mother, who tries to spread some optimism in her daughter (“If it’s one thing John hated, it’s rich people,” she says).

Like “The Rider,” “East of Wall” allows us to take its time to understand the general outline of life for people inside and out the horse world. Not everything is valid, but it is poetic, melancholy, and whip smart in its characters, dialogue, and emotions. The writer/director we haven’t heard of yet is Kate Beecroft, whose background includes short films and an acting role in “6 Underground.” With Austin Shelton’s beautiful cinematography of the running horses and her choices of actors, she makes an impressive feature debut.

Tabatha and Portia are both very good without succumbing to much mother-daughter cliches, and they give us different angles of the genre. And Ehle is also excellent as Tabatha’s mother, who has some bad influences but well-meaning intentions.

Once we hold our horses (pun intended), we’re able to see where all this is going. It’s all within the horizon.