Movie Review - Concrete Cowboy

Director and co-writer Ricky Staub in his feature debut adapts the novel, Ghetto Cowboy by Greg Neri. The film is a fictionalized account of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, a nonprofit organization in North Philadelphia dedicated to horsemanship. The local horsemen maintain and care for their equestrian animals and teach youth in the neighborhood to do so. The organization was there to keep up the tradition of urban Black cowboys or African-Americans in the city who have the heritage of befriending and riding horses. The organization like others in various cities seems to exist now mainly as an outlet or alternative for inner-city youth in order to keep them from engaging in illegal or non-productive activities. Staub's film basically exemplifies that aspect as it focuses on a particular inner-city youth.

This is of course a narrative that isn't new. Specifically, this film starts by ripping off the premise of the most acclaimed story about Black youth in the inner-city. John Singleton's Oscar-nominated Boyz n the Hood (1991) starts out with a Black mother who is single and taking her one and only child, her son, to live with his single father, so that the father can whip his son into shape and get him on the right path. Staub's film begins the exact same way. 30 years removed from Singleton's classic, it has to be said that it's a bit cliché to show a Black mother who is single throw her hands up and then ship her child, particularly her son, to his father. It depicts in an anti-feminist way that somehow the mother is incapable of handling whatever issues the son is experiencing. That trope especially doesn't work here because the film never explores what the son's issues are or what the different parenting styles in play here are.

Caleb McLaughlin (Stranger Things) stars as Cole, the young Black teen who lives in Detroit with his single mother. When he gets in trouble at school for fighting, his mother decides to drive him to Philadelphia and drop him off at his father's house. The father lives in a dilapidated row house in Strawberry Mansion, one of the poorest and crime-ridden areas in the city. It also doesn't help that Cole's father has a horse living inside the row house and spends whatever little money he has on maintaining the horse, even to the sacrifice of keeping his house clean or even stocked with groceries. Cole doesn't want to stay there but he doesn't have anywhere else to go.

Idris Elba (Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw and Thor) also stars as Harp, a sanitation worker who is also a member of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club. When he's not working, he hangs out at the horse stables with other members. He mainly just sits in the park area across from the stables with the other members around a literal trash fire, meaning a fire that's burning inside a metal trash can. When his son arrives, he's not even there to greet him. He barely says anything to him and because of his son's association with another young teen, Harp kicks Cole out. We don't really get much else from Harp in the story.

Cole doesn't have anywhere to go, so he sleeps in the stables with the horses. The next morning, the people who regularly work the stables basically give Cole a job there. The interactions he does have with his father are his father being tough on him. Cole's association with another young teen is supposed to represent his lure or seduction into the criminal aspect of any film about Black youth in the ghetto. That criminal aspect is obviously drug dealing and gang life. The danger in that life are obvious and telegraphed. We've seen the outcomes in various films, including Boyz n the Hood, so it's no surprise when it happens here.

Jharrel Jerome (When They See Us and Mr. Mercedes) co-stars as Smush, a childhood friend of Cole who now does a little drug dealing on the side. It's suggested that he perhaps was a part of the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, but he didn't like it as he saw it as a program that would turn him into someone like Harp, a trash worker, living in a crappy house, no prospects and sitting around a literal dumpster fire. Smush wanted to pursue something else that would help him to get out of the city fast, but he doesn't want to leave alone, so he enlists Cole to help him sell drugs. Smush hopes to make enough, so that they can leave and have a better life together. However, it's obviously too dangerous. I did like the friendship between Smush and Cole. It was perhaps projection, but, given Jerome's role in the Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016), I imagined that the chemistry between him and McLaughlin might turn sexual.

Alas, that would have been an interesting left turn that this film didn't seem capable of making. Every thing about this film is rather predictable. Even if you haven't seen Boyz n the Hood, it's still predictable. Last year, we got this exact same narrative in Charm City Kings (2020). The only difference is that it was Baltimore and not Philly, as well as it was motorcycles and not horses. The horse aspect of this story provided a possible wrinkle to make this film a little unique, but Cole's relationship with the horse or horses isn't felt as strong as his relationship with Smush. It's not like White Mane (1953), Flicka (2006), War Horse (2011) or The Mustang (2019). Those films, along with countless others, including some Westerns, made me feel the relationship between the human and the horse. Here, I never got that feeling.

What doesn't help is my personal bias about horses in the city. I understand the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club does good for young African-Americans in North Philly. I'm also not much of a proponent of the SPCA or PETA, but such large animals aren't like the usual pet. Arguably, horses shouldn't be pets at all. Horses should run free. If humans do keep horses, they should be kept on wide-open land where they can graze and have some sense of freedom like a range or a farm. Being cooped up in a city or urban environment just feels wrong and feels more selfish for the humans than giving the horses what they ultimately need or would want. I get wanting to maintain the tradition of Black cowboys, but humans don't need horses, not as transportation, and having them as pets shouldn't be something that's done simply for the sake of doing it. A better film about Black cowboys or one Black cowboy is Rob Morgan in Bull (2020).

Rated R for language, drug use and some violence.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 51 mins.

Available on Netflix.