{"id":68332,"date":"2020-09-16T18:00:09","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T15:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/concrete-cowboy-review-tiff-2020-film\/"},"modified":"2020-09-16T18:00:09","modified_gmt":"2020-09-16T15:00:09","slug":"concrete-cowboy-review-tiff-2020-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/concrete-cowboy-review-tiff-2020-film\/","title":{"rendered":"#Concrete Cowboy Review: TIFF 2020 \u2013 \/Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Concrete Cowboy Review: TIFF 2020 \u2013 \/Film<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

\"concrete<\/a><\/p>\n

Outside of overpriced carriage rides through historic areas, you might not expect to see horses galloping through the streets of Philadelphia. But there\u2019s a century-long tradition of Black horsemanship in the City of Brotherly Love, primarily in the\u00a0Strawberry Mansion neighborhood\u00a0located east of Fairmount Park in North Philadelphia that persists to this day. This relatively unknown, but very real scenario is the backdrop for\u00a0Concrete Cowboy<\/em><\/strong>,\u00a0Ricky Staub<\/strong>\u2018s somewhat by-the-numbers, but still sharp drama about an estranged father and son bonding over one summer in the city.<\/p>\n

Teenager\u00a0Cole (Caleb McLaughlin<\/strong>) is out of control, and his mother (Liz Priestley<\/strong>) just can\u2019t handle him anymore. After Cole gets in another fight at school \u2013 one that results in him being put in handcuffs \u2013 his mother piles his clothes into garbage packs, hustles Cole into the car, and drives the kid from Detroit to Philadelphia, where she promptly dumps him on the doorstep of his estranged father, Harp (Idris Elba<\/strong>).
\nFather and son have nothing in common, a fact that\u2019s underscored when Cole discovers Harp is something of a cowboy, lording over a series<\/a> of rough stables on Fletcher Street, where he and other horseriders pass their time \u2013 when they\u2019re not riding \u2013 shooting the shit, sitting around a fire, swigging some beers, and telling stories. And oh yeah, Harp has a horse living inside his house, too \u2013 just off to the side of the living room.<\/p>\n

Cole wants nothing to do with Harp and his horses at first and reconnects with a childhood friend,\u00a0Smush (Jharrel Jerome<\/strong>). Smush is embedded within the drug-dealers of the neighborhood and has big dreams about making enough money to get away. He used to ride, too, but gave it all up. Harp doesn\u2019t want Cole hanging around with Smush, and Cole promises he won\u2019t \u2013 a promise he breaks immedia<\/a>tely, secretly going on late-night runs with his friend.<\/p>\n

In the midst of all of this, Cole begins to grow closer to both his father and his father\u2019s lifestyle. And you can clearly see where this is going. Cole and Harp will learn to love each other despite their differences. Cole will grow to love riding horses and become something of a cowboy himself, all while his secret relationship with Smush puts him in potential danger.<\/p>\n

The script<\/a>, by\u00a0Dan Walser<\/strong> and Ricky Staub, based on the novel by Greg Neri, will probably not score any points for originality. There are times where\u00a0Concrete Cowboy<\/em> is as predictable as can be, and there are one or two moments that ring particularly false, as when a character near the end of the film gives a big pep-talk that sounds like an overwritten speech rather than something the character would actually say.<\/p>\n

And yet\u2026Concrete Cowboy\u00a0<\/em>succeeds. Sure, you know where a lot of this is going, but there\u2019s powerful filmmaking on display here. Cinematographer\u00a0Minka Farthing-Kohl<\/strong> often creates situations where scenes are deliberately underlit, swallowed up in murky shadows. And then there are the daytime scenes, tinged yellow by a burning sun, to the point where we can almost feel the heat radiating off the concrete. A scene where Cole attempts to stand atop a horse while the sun is setting \u2013 the sky awash in purples and pinks while all we see of Cole and the horse are their silhouettes \u2013 is just breathtaking.
\nThen there are the performances.\u00a0McLaughlin, so underused on\u00a0Stranger Things<\/em>, shows real acting chops here, playing Cole as someone struggling to throw the chip off his shoulder. A moment where he finally breaks down, emotional over his emotional estrangement from his father, is raw and real. Elba is just as good, finally finding a great role to suit his talents that have been thus far somewhat wasted by Hollywood. Harp is distant from Cole, but he\u2019s not mean, and when he finally thaws a bit and shows the boy some warmth, it\u2019s stirring.<\/p>\n

Still, the script keeps trip<\/a>ping over itself, and there are several scenes \u2013 such as a horse heist \u2013 that feel a bit bungled, and almost forced \u2013 as if someone, somewhere, complained that there wasn\u2019t enough action in the movie. But every time\u00a0Concrete Cowboy<\/em> is in danger of succumbing to these problems, it pulls itself back with some surprises.\u00a0One of Staub\u2019s best ideas is to cast real Fletcher Street natives, including the superb Jamil \u201cMil\u201d Prattis<\/strong> as the wheelchair-bound\u00a0Paris, who takes Cole under his wing and teaches him the fine art of shoveling horse shit.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a serious lack of movies about Black cowboys or\u00a0Black equestrians in general<\/a>, and by telling their story in the unlikeliest of settings,\u00a0Concrete Cowboy<\/em> feels vibrant and alive, even when it\u2019s suffering from its own plotting problems. And when a moment arises where a bus full of people looks on in awe as Hap, Cole, and the other riders go galloping by in slow motion, it\u2019s hard not to love\u00a0Concrete Cowboy<\/em> just a little bit.<\/p>\n

\/Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10<\/strong><\/p>\n

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“#Concrete Cowboy Review: TIFF 2020 \u2013 \/Film” Outside of overpriced carriage rides through historic areas, you might not expect to see horses galloping through the streets of Philadelphia. But there\u2019s a century-long tradition of Black horsemanship in the City of Brotherly Love, primarily in the\u00a0Strawberry Mansion neighborhood\u00a0located east of Fairmount Park in North Philadelphia that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/d13ezvd6yrslxm.cloudfront.net\/wp\/wp-content\/images\/concrete-cowboy-review.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1568,68809,50324,68810,1523,1570,4901,27098,7598,67304,27142],"class_list":["post-68332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-featured-stories-sidebar","tag-caleb-mclaughlin","tag-ce","tag-concrete-cowboy","tag-drama","tag-features","tag-film-festivals","tag-idris-elba","tag-movie-reviews","tag-tiff-2020","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}