Mark Reviews Movies: CONCRETE COWBOY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 1, 2021

There's an admirably relaxed sense of story to Concrete Cowboy, co-writer/director Ricky Staub's adaptation of Greg Neri's novel Ghetto Cowboy. The film deals with a lot—a teenage boy without a sense of place or purpose in the world, the kid's strained relationship with his absent father, a group of people clinging to a history that had been washed away and is now gradually being erased entirely. These issues matter, but Staub and co-screenwriter Dan Walser just see them as part of the everyday lives of these characters, trying to get by day after day in a world that's running out of room for them.

There's a sort of noble melancholy to this tale, about a group of horseback riders in North Philadelphia. They're Black men and women, keeping to themselves, because the world immediately outside their sphere is filled with the effects of poverty and the inevitable progression of gentrification, and holding on to their tranquil way of life. They maintain the stables where their horses are housed. They wash, brush, and otherwise tend to their steeds, because the places to ride them are slowly disappearing.

They tell stories and joke around a campfire, remembering the days when there were more stables and riders in the city and thinking about how the writing of history, as well as the movies, replaced Black cowhands with a preponderance white cowboys. This has been their way of life for years and decades. It's dying, and there's nothing to be done about that fact but to keep this way alive as long as they can.

We meet them through Cole (Caleb McLaughlin), a teenage boy with a lot of problems, currently living in Detroit with his mother (played by Liz Priestley). Cole has gotten into another fight at another school, and his mother doesn't know what to do about it. Driving through the night out east with her son's clothes in garbage bags, the mother leaves Cole at his father's stoop in Philadelphia.

The father is Harp (Idris Elba), who hasn't seen his son in a long time. He had legal trouble, served five years in prison, and came back into the world with his family gone. He doesn't blame them. The trouble was his, and the consequences are his with which deal.

Harp is one of several horseback riders in the neighborhood. Most of them have come to these stables from other ones, which have closed as real estate development has spread. Cole starts to learn the ways of this life, beginning with cleaning up after the horses and eventually getting into a saddle.

There's more, of course. Cole's childhood friend Smush (Jharrel Jerome) wants to spend time with him, mostly driving around town but also looking to move in on the business of a local drug dealer. Smush wants out of this place. He loves horses, too, but he doesn't see a future here. His future is out west, where there are ranches to buy and sell. Eventually, there'll be one he can call home—quiet and isolated and filled with a peace he craves but has yet to find in the city. Harp disapproves of his son hanging out with Smush, but Cole does so anyway. They share a dream of escaping to something better.

The film has a real generosity for these characters from top to bottom. At the heart of this story, we have Cole, searching for purpose amongst places where he doesn't feel at home, and Harp, so set in his life as it has been that he doesn't quite know how to be a father to his son. There's a particularly affecting scene between father and son, as Cole confronts Harp about feeling ignored and dismissed by his father. Harp explains his past and the origin of his son's full name—from a hero of Harp's, who did great things without a father. That scene is about reconciliation in a subtly wise way—as an acknowledgment of one's own shortcomings and an unspoken promise to do better.

We also, though, have Smush, who could have been some broadly drawn "bad influence" but instead possesses a much deeper sense of longing, and the assorted riders. Most of them are played by real horseback riders living in Philadelphia, and Staub interviews them for a sequence that plays over the film's end credits. In their thoughts on the gradual disappearance of their way of life, we realize why some of these scenes—of the riders talking the business of riding, the "whitewashing" of the history of Black cowhands (as well as the origin of the term "cowboy"), and the current displacement of this way of life—are as sincere as they are.

There isn't really a plot here. Indeed, Staub and Walser seem to go out their way to avoid anything that might distract from forming and communicating a sense of this place, these people, and this specific culture. Things eventually do go wrong with Smush's plan. There are hints of a romance between Cole and a younger rider. The stables come under threat from the law, despite the influence of Leory (Clifford "Method Man" Smith), a local cop who puts on the air of a Sheriff from a town of the Old West.

Problems arise. Things end. Life for this group, though, must—as it has for all this time—continue. It's all they have left.

Concrete Cowboy feels authentic in its characters and its portrayal of this culture. First and foremost, it's a story about them, and the filmmakers never forget that fact.

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