Julie Ledru and Antonia Buresi in Rodeo (Music Box Films)

What beats driving fast, living on the edge, and making trouble with a gorgeous sneer on your face? In Rodeo, French director Lola Quivoron creates a bad-ass biker antiheroine with Instagram discovery Julie Ledru, a nonprofessional actor who propels this slightly underrealized film forward with acrid fumes of chutzpah and charisma. When other aspects of the movie have faded, the image of Ledru’s jolie-laide face will linger on with its bruised beauty.

Ledru plays Julia, a rugged and rebellious mixed-race young woman who lives to board motorbikes. It’s actually unclear what Julia loves more, to ride bikes or to rip them off: She has perfected a scam where she swaps greasy jeans for feminine duds, feigns interest in buying a nice set of wheels, then peels away from the condescending marks who foolishly made the mistake of letting her straddle the saddle. Julia’s sheer joy in riding full throttle on the open road is a blast to see and feel.

Drawn to speed and the dangerous life, Julia tries to gain acceptance from a gang of grimy young male bikers who congregate in an urban wasteland to party, pop wheelies, and rack up some serious injuries (these treated by Quivoron with a dose of 1950-style melodrama). Julia enters a tentative flirtation with one of the bikers and crashes in the club’s machine room. Her acumen at stealing attracts the group’s boss, who runs a chop shop ring from jail. Not everyone appreciates Julia’s talents, however. She’s the victim of a violent assault after dark, most likely from one of the more hostile figures on the gang’s fringes.

After the beatdown, the film decelerates a bit. Julia recuperates at the home of the crime boss’s wife, Ophélie, a role played by the movie’s co-writer Antonia Buresi—Ophélie, clearly high-class and educated, sticks out unconvincingly as a gangster’s moll. Moments of reluctant affection between the two play out awkwardly and slowly after loads of gritty scenes reveling in handheld velocity. In the last few minutes of the movie, a daring heist tries to reinvigorate the proceedings, but it ends up with Julia drifting into a weird religious, almost saintly zone. The puzzling turn may not matter, though. Rodeo, at once raw and highly stylized, fires up a rebel-without-a-cause spirit that lets its woman warrior run free, if only for a little while. Sometimes wheels, attitude, and an unforgettable face is all you need.