Doc's son, Al, wins a wild horse in a card game and Sonora names him Lightning. Marie's employer, Doc Carver, tells her she is too young but gives her a job as a stable hand due to her ability with horses, and she begins traveling with them. She travels to the county fair and sees a performance by Marie, a diving girl who rides a horse off a platform, and aspires to do so too. Instead, having found an ad in a newspaper earlier that day for a diving horse girl, Sonora slips out of the house during the night to follow her dreams. Helen then tells Sonora that she will be sent to an orphanage the following day. After a series of troubles, which involve her accidentally letting the cows loose, punching another girl for making fun of her (she was the one who instigated the accident that let the cows out), and getting suspended from school, Aunt Helen sells her treasured horse, Lightning. Aspiring to be like her she cuts off her waist length hair causing her Aunt to make her wear a bag on her head. Sonora admires a magazine clipping of a beautiful girl in Atlantic City. In 1932 Sonora Webster lives with her sister, Arnette, and abusive Aunt Helen during the Great Depression.

It is based on events in her life as told in her memoir A Girl and Five Brave Horses.

Gabrielle Anwar stars as Carver alongside Michael Schoeffling and Cliff Robertson. It concerns Sonora Webster Carver, a rider of diving horses. Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken is a 1991 American drama film directed by Steve Miner.

Wild hearts cant be broken movie