Urban cowboy rides again
Film explores the abiding culture of black, inner-city horsemen
Historians estimate that one in four American cowboys were black but you would be hard-pressed to find a movie genre whiter than the Western. Concrete Cowboy, an urban Western about African American riders in Philadelphia starring Idris Elba, is about an often unseen — and persisting — black cowboy culture.
Concrete Cowboy is a father-son drama set around Fletcher Street Stables, one of the oldest and lastremaining of Philadelphia’s hardscrabble inner-city stables. It dates back more than 100 years to when horse-drawn wagons were used to deliver produce, laundry and milk. But through tenacity and improvisation, Fletcher Street has remained a cherished refuge and an ardent pastime for both kids and adults on the streets of Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion.
“That’s a tough neighbourhood but if you’re on top of a horse, people literally look up to you,” says Gregory Neri, author of the novel Ghetto Cowboy, the basis for the film directed by Ricky Staub.
Neri first heard about the stables in 2008 when a friend sent him a link to a Life magazine article about Fletcher Street.
“The first image I saw was this black kid on the back of a horse in the middle of the inner city in North Philly,” says Neri. “I had the reaction most people have, which is: ‘What is this? What’s going on here?’”
Concrete Cowboy, which premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival and debuts this week on Netflix, shines perhaps the brightest light yet on an abiding community of black cowboys now facing an uncertain future. It was shot in the vacant lots that Fletcher Street cowboys ride in, and the costars — alongside a cast of Elba, Caleb McLaughlin, Method Man and Jharrel Jerome — include many of the stables’ actual riders.
In a genre that’s been perpetually drawn to American myth and open plains, Concrete Cowboy is urban, contemporary and authentic.
“My dad was a big Western fan. I grew up sort of watching them with a side eye,” says Elba. “It didn’t occur to me until the Bob Marley song Buffalo Soldier, which opened my interest about black cowboys.
“And it occurred to me: I’ve been making films forever and I’ve never been offered a Western. You realise there’s a deep history that spans American and African history over decades, centuries in fact, that you’ve never seen in film.”