Concrete Cowboy Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Concrete Cowboy debuts exclusively on Netflix on April 2. [poilib element="accentDivider"] 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 Urban Riding Club, 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. The foremost questions surrounding this premise, which are vital to understanding the film’s drama, are as follows: What does Cole want, deep down? Why does Harp seem so uncaring? And why does Harp take issue with Cole spending time with Smush? The film doesn’t answer these questions in any narratively interesting way. It only hints at the first two, in a clunky, graceless exposition scene led by a conflicted cop character (played by Clifford “Method Man” Smith), nearly an hour and a half into its 111-minute runtime. As for the third question, one can perhaps infer that Smush is dealing drugs — he’s indebted to someone up the food chain, and he keeps mentioning encroaching on people’s territory — but despite the amount of time we see Cole spend with him, we never actually get a glimpse at what Smush does or how he does it, and in the process, what kind of life Cole is actually choosing in lieu of working at Fletcher Street. [ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://ift.tt/39tseOi] Similarly, the film’s father-son dynamic requires a whole lot of presumption by the audience and a fair amount of heavy lifting by McLaughlin and Elba. They both deliver measured performances that require them to dig deep (McLaughlin as an angsty teen on the verge of exploding, and Elba as distant father weighed down by regret), but their exchanges go from zero to sixty without much discernible build or backdrop to their disagreements. Cole, Harp and Smush are on screen for most of the film, but they seem to pop into existence at the beginning of a given scene, disintegrate when the film cuts away, and re-materialize elsewhere, as mere ideas, rather than moving from place to place as real people with evolving emotional responses. Although, the fact that they feel like silhouettes is somewhat fitting. Despite its lack of emotional through-line, the film features numerous striking shots that help deliver at least some semblance of internal story — among them, a gorgeous moment of Cole donning a cowboy hat at dusk as he sits atop a horse, awash in shadow as if evoking the very idea of an urban cowboy, or stepping into his father’s shoes. In moments like these, the film pulls away from its larger plot and presents incredible abstract portraits of each character, like Smush’s isolated hideout beneath a bridge, which features beams of light piercing through the darkness as he dreams of a hopeful escape from his life. However, these moments are few and far between. For the most part, the film follows a linear, granular plot, which often feels as directionless as Cole himself, albeit unintentionally. For every impressionistic use of shadow, there’s an equally amateurish use of traditional dramatic coverage, where close-ups in conversation scenes have mismatched eyelines and the characters are framed awkwardly from shot to shot, resulting in a lack of clarity regarding their physical and emotional relationships to one another, and to the space around them. (Where someone is looking during a conversation is pretty vital to understanding their mindset). The film’s misuse of visual space is where many of its problems lie. In fact, these issues are best illuminated by comparing Concrete Cowboy to the 2017 Atlantic photo series “The Equestrians of North Philly” by Ann Sophie Lindström. The series not only captures the very same people — like real lifelong rider Jamil Prattis, who appears in the film as Cole’s disabled mentor — but the very same streets and stables. A brief glimpse at each photograph offers a window into the relationships between the people, the streets, the buildings, and the horses, something the film fails to contextualize in its nearly two-hour runtime. Lindström’s pictures capture all these elements in the same frame, and while the film certainly isn’t beholden to this or any other aesthetic, it rarely frames people and places together in the same shot, or moves between them, or establishes their relationships in successive shots. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=netflix-spotlight-april-2021&captions=true"] 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.” [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=worst-reviewed-movies-of-2021&captions=true"]

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