Concrete Cowboy

Based on a book by Gregory Neri, Concrete Cowboy follows 15-year-old Cole (Caleb McLaughlin) as he’s sent to live with his estranged father (Idris Elba’s Harp) for the summer – with the narrative detailing Cole’s introduction into the world of inner-city horse training. It’s certainly a unique premise that is, to an increasingly distressing extent, employed to tedious, uninvolving effect by first-time filmmaker Ricky Staub, as the director, working from a script written with Dan Walser, delivers an egregiously deliberate drama that contains few elements designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest – with, especially, the picture’s lack of a compelling protagonist exacerbating the decidedly arms-length atmosphere. (McLaughlin is good here, certainly, yet it remains difficult to connect to his sullen, morose character.) There’s little doubt, then, that Concrete Cowboy‘s sporadically watchable atmosphere is due to the novelty of its setup and its smattering of compelling sequences (eg Harp tells Cole about his past, a wayward horse must be retrieved from a local baseball diamond, etc), although it’s clear that such above-average moments are, ultimately, crushed beneath the weight of a ludicrously overlong running time – with the end result a disappointingly ineffective piece of work that could (and should) have been so much better. (If nothing else, at least, Concrete Cowboy succeeds as an evocative portrait of a surprising way of life within Philadelphia.)

** out of ****