Review: The Sidekick as Hero in ‘The Ballad of Lefty Brown’

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“Sorry don’t get it done.” With that line, the likable, easygoing western “The Ballad of Lefty Brown” tips its battered cowboy hat to its genre influences. John Wayne delivers that same admonition in “Rio Bravo,” Howard Hawks’s 1959 masterpiece about a sheriff and a ragtag group holding off a powerful, autocratic rancher. (Wayne’s sheriff is chiding his alcoholic deputy, played by Dean Martin.) In large and small ways, that film and other classics from the western canon inform “Lefty Brown,” which opens one dark, stormy night in the Montana territory in 1889, the year it became the 41st state.

One of the foundational themes of the western is the making of America, an origin story that plays out in tales about frontiers, borders, wagon trains, settlements, railroads, towns, cowboys and Indians. Invariably, these are narratives of violent transformations in which land becomes property and some people become citizens while others remain outlaws or are turned into permanent exiles. In “Lefty Brown,” those changes have already affected a Montana rancher, Edward Johnson (Peter Fonda), who has recently been elected a senator and is headed east. He’s a classic type, the outsider as insider who, as he tells his wife, Laura (Kathy Baker), is “going to take on all of Washington.”

Some 10 minutes into the film, though, a villain fatally derails Edward’s plans, spurring the story forward and igniting its slow-burning mystery. Laura accuses Edward’s longtime hand, Lefty (Bill Pullman), of failing her husband. (“You were supposed to watch his back,” a grieving Laura tells an apologetic, equally bereft Lefty. “Sorry don’t get it done.”) Lefty sets off to find Edward’s killer, a quest that becomes a journey and leads him straight into trouble. He soon meets an inexpert traveler, Jeremiah (Diego Josef), who has killed his own horse. All Jeremiah knows of the West are the romantic myths that he has learned from tattered dime novels, some of which feature fictionalized tales right out of Lefty’s past.

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The writer-director Jared Moshé takes his time in “Lefty Brown,” which meanders here and there for close to two hours, ranging over picturesque, Big Sky landscapes while rambling deeper into prickly narrative complications. If there isn’t much urgency it’s partly because Lefty has been rather too closely modeled on the irascible if endearing coots played by the likes of Walter Brennan. Often grizzled comic relief, though sometimes tragic, these sidemen stand in the long, tall shadow of the hero, giving him grief while always following his lead. They’re loyal dogs, surrogate nannies, maybe close pals. They’re types that need more to carry a movie than Mr. Moshé has given Lefty.

Like Brennan’s character, Stumpy, in “Rio Bravo,” Lefty has a noticeable limp and the pitch of his voice periodically slides to lightly comedic heights. (You can hear a bit of Slim Pickens’s warble, too.) At times, Lefty seems like the sum of his inspirations, which remains true even as the film progresses and settles into its groove. Central to the movie’s modest pleasures is how it engages with screen history; at the same time, as the too familiar story of good men and bad, loyalty and betrayal emerges, these allusions can remind you that you’re not watching Howard Hawks. Instead, Jim Caviezel and Tommy Flanagan ride up, and the plot continues to thicken amid firing guns.

Mr. Pullman, his good looks obscured by chiaroscuro shadows and mutton chops, keeps you tethered to Lefty even when the rambling turns to drift. Mr. Moshé knows his genre. There’s beauty in his panoramas and charm in his reflexive gestures, typified by Jeremiah’s love for the mythic heroism that foreshadows his and Lefty’s future. Yet self-consciousness is also a hallmark of this genre; Douglas Fairbanks’s would-be cowboy reads dime novels in the 1917 film “Wild and Woolly.” Even so, while Mr. Moshé’s ambitions can be frustratingly modest, he does know that — however fraudulent the genre’s myths — the image of a man riding a horse into the sunset is in our cinematic DNA.