Alcohol, illegal on the reservation, is a scourge of this impoverished community. Johnny Winters (John Reddy), the movie’s teenage protagonist and sporadic narrator, has a history of substance abuse and is involved in a bootlegging operation that leads to a vicious beating by more experienced rivals. In the first words heard in the film, Johnny, on horseback, warns that if you keep running a horse, you’ll break its spirit. He observes: “Anything that runs wild got something bad in ’em. You want to leave some of that in there ’cause they need it to survive out here.”

Johnny is one of 25 children, from nine wives, of a bull rider who died in a fire. He and his peers jokingly address one another as “brother from another mother.” Johnny’s embittered older brother, Cody (Justin Reddy), is in prison. When their alcoholic, guilt-ridden single mother, Lisa (Irene Bedard), visits Cody and tells him that she’s found God, he sarcastically replies, “Just don’t make God another man you abandoned your children for.”

Most of Johnny’s fellow students at Little Wound High School have no expectations of leaving the reservation. When a teacher questions them about their dreams for the future, Johnny, awakening from a hangover, says he wants to be a boxer or a bull rider. He also fantasizes about escaping his dead-end existence by following his girlfriend, Aurelia (Taysha Fuller), an aspiring lawyer, who’s moving to Los Angeles for college. Asked by the teacher where he would live and what he would do for work, his answer is a sullen “I’ll figure it out.”