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Apr 6, 2021 Full Review Manuel São Bento MSB Reviews Concrete Cowboy holds a formulaic, unsurprising coming-of-age story that could have been more captivating had it focused on the main narrative.
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Apr 1, 2021 · Their morals are often defined by clear-cut notions of good and evil. The best ones blur that binary delineation, and while “Concrete Cowboy” isn’t exactly a Western, it’s comfortable cribbing some of the contents of the genre. There’s a gorgeous sunrise, a powerful scene of horse-taming, and the spectacle of seeing Idris Elba on a horse.
- The streets of Filly-delphia.
- Netflix Spotlight: April 2021
- Verdict
By Siddhant Adlakha
Updated: Nov 4, 2022 12:02 am
Posted: Mar 30, 2021 5:40 pm
Concrete Cowboy debuts exclusively on Netflix on April 2.
Netflix’s Concrete Cowboy is intriguing on paper. It’s based on the G. Neri novel “Ghetto Cowboy,” it features the on-screen talents of Caleb McLaughlin (Stranger Things), Jharrel Jerome (Moonlight), and Idris Elba, and it centers on a seldom talked-about subculture in the United States: Black cowboys in inner-city Philadelphia. However, the film, by first-time feature director and Philly native Ricky Staub, suffers from visual and thematic tunnel vision. Despite occasional moments of deft filmmaking, it rarely captures what its characters or their surroundings are about, and it coasts entirely on the innate charisma of its cast.
McLaughlin plays Cole, a troubled, directionless Detroit high schooler whose fed-up mother Amahle (Liz Priestley) ships him off to live with his estranged father Harp (Elba) for the summer. Cole brings nothing but two trash bags full of clothes. Harp, a horseman by trade, owns even less than that. His scant kitchen is stocked only with a handful of beers, and the couch he eventually lets Cole sleep on is adjacent to his permanent houseguest: a horse named Chuck. Cole’s only two options, at this squalid summer getaway, are either shoveling horse dung at the stables around the corner — the real-life Fletcher Street Stables, of which Harp is part owner — or riding around the city with his lively childhood buddy, Smush (Jerome). Cole opts for the latter, but Harp takes issue with this, forcing Cole to choose between hanging out with Smush, or living under his roof, though the aloof wrangler provides little incentive for Cole to actually stick around.
Staub and cinematographer Minka Farthing-Kohl rightly love their leads and are constantly fixated on their emotions. But the edit (by Luke Ciarrocchi) seldom breaks away from the characters to capture their world or the way they move through space, or the perspective they have on their surroundings. The filmmakers love their cowboys, but they present them in fragments and forget about the concrete in the process. This wouldn’t be as big an issue if the major external conflict weren’t about concrete itself, and the way the cityscape is constantly shifting around the cowboys. On its surface, the film is about gentrification. Characters mention it from time to time, and they discuss how close it’s getting to the stables — the film’s climax is even built around it — but there’s no physical sense of its encroachment. The camera never turns far enough away from the stables to capture the inevitable injustice on the horizon. For a film so deeply entrenched in the imagery of the Western, one would think the odd landscape shot might carry over.
The film does, in theory, find itself at odds with the traditional Hollywood cowboy and American mythology. The characters, at one point, talk about the ways cinema has whitewashed American history — one in four cowboys were Black, though comparatively few have been depicted in movies — but this conflict between American self-image and racial reality crops up only in spurts, in the broadest, most scattered elements of the plot. Of course, the very image of Harp, a Black man, riding on horseback through narrow city streets, rather than through open plains, runs intrinsically counter to Hollywood’s usual depiction of the cowboy. But the film, rather than dramatizing these themes, seems satisfied with having its characters comment on them and point in their direction. It doesn’t engage with the core aesthetic idea represented by Harp, one connecting historical indignities against African Americans to their modern displacement, except for a few brief lines of dialogue.
Cole, for his part, has a nice little subplot about learning to stand atop a horse — which seems to have its roots in a 2005 Life Magazine article on Fletcher Street, the basis for Neri’s book — but he feels most like a passenger in the stories of Smush and Harp. At one point, Cole bonds with a supposedly untrainable horse who other riders have given up on. But despite this reflection of himself, as someone who feels discarded and unloved, this dynamic, too, feels like a brief suggestion rather than emotional baggage. Add to that Cole’s sudden, half-baked romance with minor character Esha (played by real-life rider Ivannah Mercedes), and poor McLaughlin becomes stuck in a never-ending series of unconnected dramatic sketches, which work in isolation, but rarely feel connected.
Concrete Cowboy is rife with great ideas and shorts bursts of poetic filmmaking — among them, a lively celebration and horse race midway through, which feels both propulsive and immersive — but for the most part, it fails to treat Fletcher Street as much more than a disposable matte painting. Its cast performs admirably, but the unfortunate irony is that the characters played by seasoned actors are eventually outshone by real Fletcher riders like Prattis and Ivannah Mercedes, not during the film, but in interview segments that play over the closing credits. Despite their brevity, these glimpses act as portraits of real struggle and wistfulness, which feel fuller and more alive than the rest of the fictional story. It’s never a good sign when a film’s parting message is “this should’ve been a documentary instead.”
Concrete Cowboy, by first-time feature director Ricky Staub, has occasional bursts of exciting filmmaking, but it’s kept afloat largely by the innate charisma of its cast. The film focuses on the Black cowboys of modern Philadelphia, but despite hinting at tales of displacement and historical erasure, it fails to capture the struggles and lived rea...
- Siddhant Adlakha
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Concrete Cowboy is for families with teens. Concrete Cowboy (2021) is a Netflix film starring Idris Elba and Caleb McLaughlin, and tells about a young teenager named Cole who goes to live with his father in Philadelphia. His father has be largely absent from Cole's life, and Cole is repeatedly getting expelled from schools.
- Netflix
- Ricky Staub
Sep 14, 2020 · Critics Pick ‘Concrete Cowboy’ Review: Idris Elba Plays a Tough Inner-City Horseman in Masterful Father-Son Drama Director Ricky Staub ('The Cage') delivers a great street-level debut with ...
Apr 2, 2021 · Apr 3, 2021. 'Concrete Cowboy' is your regular coming of age film. Caleb McLaughlin shines as a troubled kid finding his place in a new community, as well as a new relationship with his estranged father. The chemistry with Idris Elba is good, but the conflict's outcome can be seen since the beginning.
Concrete Cowboy, a wonderful Netflix film about a black teen named Cole who gets rescued from drug-dealing street life by his father's tough love, is an inspiring and beautiful story. Full Review ...
