Fearless: The Unbelievable Ride of Jonnie Jonckowski

Gripping new documentary, Jonnie, captures the highs, lows, and defiant legacy of a barrier-breaking bull rider whose life story is as shocking as it is inspiring.

PBR

A spellbinding new documentary chronicling the eventful life of trail-blazing bull rider Jonnie Jonckowski often feels like fiction, as if writer-director Sabrina Lee stretched the boundaries of the biographical form. She doesn’t. What unfolds is real, almost impossible to believe.

Jonckowski, the first woman to compete against men in a national bull riding championship, comes across like a rule-breaking spitfire pulled from a Taylor Sheridan script: battered and defiant, all throttle, no brake, zero quit.

Lee’s film leans into that mythic quality without losing its footing or creating a caricature – blending archival footage, interviews and animated reenactments to ground a tumultuous story that constantly threatens to outrun credibility.

Sakshi Jain | Sakshi Jain

At 9 years old, little Jonnie is left to move a herd of nearly 90 cattle on an unfamiliar trail, and as the sun sets winds up finding her way to safety and into a bar to enjoy her first whiskey and beer.  

Jonnie track photo | PBR

A gifted athlete, she channels her competitive fire into track until a crash on the hurdles derails her plans to qualify for the 1976 Olympics. She is temporarily paralyzed, then gets her body ripped to ride bulls.

Rodeo schools didn’t accept girls. Jonckowski gets in anyway – her first name easily mistaken for one of the boys. She’s more stubborn and determined than most of them; with the mind and body of an athlete, she excels at staying on bulls.

Lee contextualizes the danger with the help of nine-time world champion Ty Murray and PBR’s longtime head of sports medicine Tandy Freeman, who frame bull riding as a life-and-death collision sport – violent, unpredictable and unforgiving.

Jonckowski | Dan Hubbell

Brazenly competitive, Jonckowski embraces the grind. Traveling thousands of miles to win a few hundred dollars, she becomes addicted to what she calls “the charge, the rush,” chasing the thrill of conquering bulls and quieting naysayers. The cost is staggering: burned skin, broken bones, shattered teeth, a face repeatedly reconstructed.

In one sequence, she defeats a field of cowboys – only to be kicked between the eyes while dismounting, requiring 160 stitches. From her hospital bed, she learns she won’t receive the trophy. She’s a woman.

A rodeo star recites a common view, caught in news footage used effectively throughout the film: “There’s a certain thing for women to do and there’s a certain thing men should do. And rodeo’s a man’s event.”

Jonnie laughs off the narrow-minded commentary. She can’t stop, obsessed with being recognized as the best in the world.

Riding for her first women’s championship, she is stepped on, nearly severing her calf from her knee, sustaining a very dangerous compartment syndrome injury. A doctor warns she may lose her leg if she competes. She is hoisted into the bucking chutes to ride again…and win the world title.

She interviews with David Letterman and Charlie Rose and dates celebrities including Neil Diamond and Dan Haggerty. The relationships fizzle in favor of commitments to respective careers. 

Midway through the film, a dark turn is taken when Jonnie is forced to turn the tables on a marauding group of teenage boys in an empty airport in Mexico. The film’s use of sketch animation by Sakshi Jain, here and throughout many flashbacks, helps soften the unfolding horror from decades ago, allowing the audience to secretly cheer the lethal action taken to survive the attack.   

Lee spends more time on the sweeter juxtaposition of Jonnie, heart on her sleeve and tears in her eyes, rescuing horses that have been beaten, abandoned and left for dead, training them to provide equine therapy for shut ins and lonely geriatric patients.

Nothing in her life comes easy; Lee charts Jonnie’s struggle in keeping her Angel Horses foundation going following a devastating flood. Nothing can diminish her heartwarming love for Jasper, a former racehorse who had been fed rocks to fatten him up for the kill pen before she saves and rehabilitates him.

Jonnie with her horse | Erika Share

Jonnie is far more than a rodeo or sports film – made clear during a sneak preview in late March in Bozeman, Montana, where an audience of more than 400 rose to their feet as the closing credits rolled.

The film will have its official premiere on April 16 at the historic Alberta Bair Theater in Billings, Montana, the night before PBR’s elite tour is in action at First Interstate Arena.

“People are moved by the humanity of Jonnie’s story,” Lee said. “What captivates people most about Jonnie is this incredible toughness to a person who is also extremely warm and emotionally generous. We want to conceive athletes as immune to the full range of human emotions with superhuman physical power blocking everything else out. But Jonnie is an exposed nerve in the universe.” 

With women’s bull riding amid a revival – six women from ages 15 to 31 will compete at the PWR (Premier Women’s Rodeo) Championship in Fort Worth inside Cowtown Coliseum on May 14 and 15 – Jonckowski’s story is especially timely.

Jonnie | Stan Parker

But Lee aims broader than simply recounting an important figure in rodeo history. Her film reveals the fierce and inextinguishable depths of the human spirit.

The result is a raw, sometimes overwhelming, ultimately moving portrait of a strong woman who endured more than most could accept, repeatedly stomped by bulls – and life – to keep going anyway.

Sabrina Lee’s film doesn’t just tell the story of an athlete who chose bull riding, vowing to win or die. It introduces a human who transcends sports and becomes impossible to forget.

To learn more about Angel Horses or make a donation, please visit https://angelhorses.org/