A documentary by Michel O. Scott. Rated PG. Opens Friday, February 12, at the Ridge Theatre

Texans Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff struggle just to get through the day while raising an autistic child. In the alternately fascinating and infuriating new documentary The Horse Boy, six-year-old Rowan is almost unreachable. He’s never been toilet trained and his tantrums can go on for four hours. So what do they do? The family heads out on a horse-riding venture in the far reaches of outer Mongolia, naturally.

Isaacson’s insane notion forms the basis for the movie and shows just how far a parent is willing to go to try to save his child. Isaacson has his reasons: he’s witnessed his child relax into blissful calm on the back of a horse, and he believes in the healing power of shamanism, the state religion of Mongolia and one that sees conditions like Rowan’s as less an affliction than a gift of heightened awareness. And can you blame the father? Amid the thoughtful experts the film scatters into the mix, none can agree on the definition of autism, let alone therapies.

Unfortunately for the idealistic and driven Isaacson, things do not proceed smoothly. While the first of the shamans are beating their drums at the screaming child and his father restrains him, Isaacson asks in the voice-over, without any detectable irony: “Was I being a terrible parent?” Both the boy and the skeptical mother (a psych prof) last only 30 minutes on the first horseback trek up into the picturesque Steppes, bailing and riding in the crew’s van.

Still, you start to root for them to find miracles, even if it’s just the small ones they finally settle on: for Isaacson, it’s that his son ride a horse alone; for Neff, it’s simply that Rowan stop “going poopy” in his pants. Horse Boy does have some remarkable moments late in the adventure, though you can feel it straining too hard to find dramatic change. It’s less convincing as a document of healing than of a portrait of a family fighting to find itself again—even if it means fleeing to the ends of the Earth.