Urban cowboy packs a punch
Concrete Cowboy (13+, 111 mins) Directed by Ricky Staub Reviewed by James Croot ★★★1⁄2
Cole (Caleb McLaughlin) has finally gone too far.
Yet another school fight has the North Detroit teen facing expulsion – and his mother is at her wits’ end.
‘‘I’ve done all I can trying to convince another principal and security that my son knows better,’’ she says, as she piles his clothes into bags.
Her solution? To send Cole to his estranged father’s – for the summer at least.
North Philadelphia is a very different place and Harp (Idris Elba) leads a rather unconventional lifestyle – especially when seen through the eyes of a cynical young man.
Informed by neighbours that Harp can be found at the Fletcher St Stables, Cole is shocked to discover his Pa is an urban cowboy, keeping order in this impoverished ‘‘wild west’’ from atop a horse.
And, it turns out, Harp is just as unimpressed with his young charge coming back into his life, as Cole is with being there: ‘‘I ain’t got no home here,’’ the boy opines. ‘‘That’s your choice,’’ comes the swift reply.
He decides work and advice are what’s needed. ‘‘Hard things come before good things,’’ Harp offers up, before politely suggesting that a stall that needs mucking out is no place for ‘‘bling sneakers’’ and there’s a right and a wrong way to shovel s…
However, as the pair begin to slowly bond, Cole also faces the harsh reality that this seemingly idyllic, less hurried and harried life hides a dark underbelly that pervades the surrounding streets.
Elba is at his convincing, charismatic best in this adaptation of Greg Neri’s 2011 book Ghetto Cowboy, itself inspired by the reallife riders of the Fletcher St Stables.
The sight of him sporting a cowboy hat, pink bandanna, yellow gloves and unbuttoned denim shirt will be enough for some fans, but he backs it up with a nuanced, powerfully understated performance of a complex character.
Harp is an inspiration to many, but one saddled with plenty of his own issues.
Director and co-writer Ricky Staub, making his feature debut, does a terrific job of creating a very specific sense of space and place and, while this slow-burning drama’s sometimes meandering pace may test the patience of some viewers, when it kicks into gear (or explodes into violence), those scenes really pack a punch.
Staub’s other classy stroke is surrounding Elba and McLaughlin with a posse of the real-life Fletcher St stablemen, who add grit and gravitas as they share their barelyscripted stories and hardlyrepressed regrets at how Hollywood has previously whitewashed their experiences, as ‘‘cowhands’’ became the archetypal ‘‘cowboys’’.
It’s a memorable and enlightening message to take away, even if the central paternal drama doesn’t quite have the same stickability.