Butler's Cinema Scene

“CONCRETE COWBOY” My rating: B (Netflix)

111 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Inner city kid facing an uncertain future is saved by a program that mixes tough love with animal husbandry.

Uh…haven’t we seen this movie about a hundred times already?

Well, yes and no.

The basic plot of “Concrete Cowboy” offers little in the way of surprises. It’s very familiar territory.

The presentational style, though, is fresh and gritty and hugely effective. It’s more Chloe Zhao art film than movie-of-the-week melodrama.

Troubled Detroit teen Cole (Caleb McLaughlin) is sullen and angry. He’s being expelled from school for fighting.

So his desperate mother throws his shit into a black plastic trash bag, drags the kid into her car, and overnight drives him the 600 miles to Philadelphia, where she unceremoniously dumps the boy on his father’s doorstep. She’s going to let her ex deal with the young punk over the summer.

“Dad” is Harp (Idris Elba), who lives in a mostly-black neighborhood on the city’s northern edge.  At first glance there’s nothing special about the block of decaying row houses on which Harp lives…until you realize that one old commercial buiilding has been converted into a stable.

Harp and his neighbors are horse junkies. It’s not like they’re an official club or anything…the so-called Fletcher Street Riders (they’re a real thing) just love horses and spend whatever spare money they’ve got to feed, groom and outfit the big animals.  Any cash left over is devoted to communal bonfires replete with weed and whisky. (They’re kind of like benign black bikers with horsies instead of Harleys.)

The screenplay by Dan Walser and director Ricky Staub follows Cole’s gradual assimilation into this clan of urban equestrians…not that it’s an easy transition.

For one thing, he and the old man do not get along. The kid ends up sleeping in the stables, sharing a stall with a horse so mean it seems destined for the glue factory.  And, yes, the angry animal bonds with the angry teen.

Meanwhile there’s his dangerous friendship with Smush (Jharrel Jerone), who sucks Cole into an ill-advised plan to sell drugs.

Elba is top billed here, and he brings a smoldering intensity and quiet dignity to Harp. Especially fine is a monologue in which he explains to his estranged son why he named him Cole (he’s a John Coltrane fan).

But “Concrete Cowboy”  is very much an ensemble piece with the likes of Lorraine Toussaint and Method Man portraying residents who become Cole’s mentors.

And in true Chloe Zhao fashion, several roles are filled by real-life Fletcher Streeters portraying themselves.  There is, for instance, a marvelous debut by Jamil Prattis, a paraplegic whose character, Paris, is seen getting out of his wheelchair and onto a horse with the help of a special saddle designed by Harp.

Director Staub employs handheld cameras and a casually observational style; the result is a film that feels more documentary than fictional and which prefers small details to big pronouncements.

“Concrete Cowboy” is crammed with socio-economic underpinnings.  The stable functions as a community center, a refuge for citizens struggling with economic deprivation and personal problems ranging from broken families to drug abuse. 

There are even issues of gentrification.  Late in the film the authorities swoop down on the urban horsemen for alleged mistreatment of their steeds, but perhaps it’s more about getting these poor people out of the way of developers.

The film falters in its final moments, with an implausible scene in which Harp and Cole break into a county facility to retrieve their confiscated animals.  The moment scores a 10 for wish fulfillment and 0 for plausibility…but by this time most viewers will have been so sucked into the world of Fletcher Street that it won’t matter.

| Robert W. Butler