'Concrete Cowboy' Review: A Gift-Horse The Filmmakers Looked In The Mouth [TIFF 2020]
As a Torontonian, I am extremely proud of my home festival, TIFF, as they practice what so many other festivals merely preach. Ever since my days as a young cinephile, studying the art form at York University, only a subway ride or Go Bus away from the annual downtown festival, I saw how TIFF tried to give a voice to a diverse collection of artists.
Concrete Cowboy, based off the novel “Ghetto Cowboy” by Gregory Neri, is a tale suited best to tell in front of a campfire. This modern fable also turns up the volume on an otherwise unheard voice. The film focuses on a young man, Cole (played by Stranger Things’ Caleb McLaughlin), who after wearing his mother down with his constant bad behaviour, is shipped to inner-city Philadelphia to live with his father, Harp (Idris Elba) a man who has chosen to be unheard and unseen in Cole’s life.
As the story unfolds, we discover that Harp, a hard edged man, who appropriately possesses ‘true grit’, is part of the smallest of subcultures within Philly’s history, that of urban-Cowboys. These men and women, care for horses in downtown stables to preserve a long forgotten part of the city’s history, and their own culture. This is why Concrete Cowboy fits TIFF’s mission statement. The movie is literally about ‘the voiceless’; that tiny forgotten aspect of Black-America which needs to be brought to the light. That is why it is such a shame that it gets lost in an otherwise formulaic ‘coming of age’ film for inner-city youth.
Audiences will sense the familiarity almost immediately, we have seen the story a thousand times; a rough kid/neighbourhood/school that is magically transformed by dance/song/his overbearing uncle (or in this case, Father). The young protagonist finds something they didn’t expect in this hard world, and as their tough exterior slowly melts away, this ‘magical thing’ teaches them the respect, discipline and human connection they needed in life to become a well-balanced individual. The tragedy is this is an important story to tell, and even how Cole’s fictional story mirrors the story of the real life characters in Concrete Cowboy. It is revealed in the final credit sequence that the ‘actors’ (other than a select few) were actually playing versions of themselves, and many of them mirror that same sentiment that Hollywood has manipulated into a trope - that they wouldn’t be here unless it was for these stables. These are real stories, Concrete Cowboy is for the most part, a real story, but after being fed the Hollywood version of it for the better part of three-decades, it becomes less impactful.
With the importance falling on the real life stories, it seemed like this story would have been much better served if it was a documentary. That the ‘fictional’ aspects of Concrete Cowboy is not just one trope, but over one-hundred minutes of nothing but tropes. If you’re familiar with this kind of story, you can impress your friends by predicting exactly what’s going to happen next; how the rise in action will finally reach a climax, how things will be resolved, how some friends become enemies or enemies become friends, and the price of the lesson Cole has to pay, down to the exact penny.
It is not a matter of the story being told in Concrete Cowboy, as the message is one that needs to be put on film, it is a matter of how it was told. Even the charm and notoriety of McLaughlin and Elba falls flat. There is nothing about this story or this film that stands out, other than perhaps the unique ‘gimmick’. Even though the word gimmick seems unfair, it is the only thing that separates Concrete Cowboy’s formulaic story from all those other films.
Writer/director Ricky Staub, seemed as absent from this film as Harp from Cole’s life. He seemingly made no real contribution to this film stylistically or artistically (hence the reason I’m only now mentioning him). It’s often asked of filmmakers “why was this an important story to tell?” and there’s no denying that importance, but Staub, a very green filmmaker, who only a few short years ago was an on-set assistant to actors, needs to look at the method in which he portrays stories. He needs to make better, more fitting choices to give the story the best chance to be seen, heard, and taken with the importance it deserves. It was almost as if he felt that the premise was enough to separate Concrete Cowboy from its contemporaries, but sadly, it needed so much more.