Netflix’s Concrete Cowboy is a gorgeous take on the mythos of the cowboy

In the collective American mind, the cowboy is often depicted as a white man with cornflower blue eyes and hair the color of fresh-cut hay. They’re a symbol of the heartland and the West. A piece of Americana dripping with a rich history and culture, not bygone, not artifact but disappearing from the societal consciousness outside of their depiction in pop culture. What Concrete Cowboy—Netflix‘s latest original movie–does is remind people or, in some cases, tell them for the first time that the cowboy has never solely been a white figure in American history or in the present day.

The film, written by Ricky Staub and Dan Walser, is the feature directorial debut of Staub. It’s an adaptation of the middle-grade novel Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri.

In an opening sequence that introduces the audience to Caleb McLaughlin’s Cole, we meet him through the lens of his misbehavior. A message plays over his harried mother’s drive to get to his school in North Detroit. Cole has once again gotten into a fight. One in which the school police had to drag him off the person he was fighting with and that lands him handcuffed with his hands behind his back waiting on his mom outside the front office.

Cole’s expulsion is the last straw. At her wit’s end, his mom Amahle (Liz Priestley) dumps Cole on his father’s stoop in North Philly, telling him that he’ll be spending the summer with his dad. Her drive away is the last the audience will see of her until the end of the movie because this isn’t a film about troubled boys and the tired mothers who love them.

Concrete Cowboy is a film about community and tradition

In all honesty, even with Idris Elba in the role of Harp, Concrete Cowboy isn’t a story about at-risk boys and their estranged fathers either. While the film has been shopped as a father-son drama, it’s more of a coming-of-age story centered on the importance of community. Cole spends more time with everyone else in the film than his own father, a point that’s addressed in a tear-filled scene where Cole learns his dad named him after John Coltrane.

Harp, set to do a five-year stint in prison, chose Coltrane because the jazz musician was the strongest man he knew who made it through life without a father. But really, no one makes it through life without anyone, though that doesn’t mean people aren’t left.

Smush, Cole’s big-hearted dreamer of a cousin caught up in the wrong life, knows that better than any of the other characters in Concrete Cowboy. Jharrel Jerome plays him with a sensitivity and a tenderness that makes you want to root for Smush to get his dream even though it’s clear that his fate runs in only one direction, the grave.

Still, it’s through Smush that we first hear the line that sits at the central core of the film, “Home ain’t a place; it’s fam.”

As a young man left by the people in his life because of their own issues and his drug-running, Smush is meant to be a cautionary tale. Concrete Cowboy, however, is full of tales.

Structured like a collection of vignettes, the film cares less about a narrative that focuses on character development than it does about building character. By that I mean, these are archetypes.

Cole is a lost, surly kid whose anger at the world is drowning him in misery. Harp is a man of few words who has an easier time caring for horses than he does his own son. Nessie, played by the criminally underutilized Lorraine Toussaint, is the wise next-door neighbor who’s seen it all and still prays for better.

Paris (Jamil Prattis, a real-life Fletcher Street rider) is the patient man who takes pity on Cole and teaches him how to care for the stables and the horses while also being a cautionary tale for him as his paralysis is a result of an altercation that took his brother from him.

Esha (Ivannah Mercedes, a real-life Fletcher Street rider) is a cowgirl around Cole’s age who grows to form a romantic connection with Cole. Cliff ‘Method Man’ Smith plays Leroy, the law and a man close to the cowboys.

Their archetypes fill out the community that is the Fletcher Street Stables of North Philadelphia. Loose and serving more of a vibe than in-depth character exploration, it’s with them that Concrete Cowboy feels most like a western.

Through the usage of stunning light work, play with shadows, and iconography that screams “cowboy,” the attention to the mythology of the subculture is visually arresting especially in contrast to Philadelphia as the backdrop.

It strikes at the heart of this century-old tradition of Black horsemanship in the city. To the joy in it. That’s depicted in the film through the love of their work, the care they take in their horses, their racing during cookouts, and their willingness to fight for their way of life. For many of them, becoming horsemen saved their lives.

So, while Concrete Cowboy lacks the father-son development that one would expect from it, the movie doesn’t fail in exulting the Black cowboy even with its attention to the realities of their lives. Its spirit is felt in every shot, the power and peace that is found not in breaking an animal but in becoming one with them. As Cole does with Boo, as Smush did with Chuck.

It’s about finding your place in a world that constantly forces you to look over your shoulder. For some in North Philly, like the riders in the film and the Fletcher Street Stables, that’s in a collective of horsemen uplifting a tradition and a culture that’s as much a part of the city as anything else.

Concrete Cowboy is available to stream on Netflix on April 2, 2021.