Review: "Concrete Cowboy"

 

Black cowboys riding the range on the mean streets of Philly? It sounds like a fantastical Hollywood concoction, but as "Concrete Cowboy" movingly illustrates, inner-city stables were and are a real, albeit dying way of life stubbornly clung to by modern horse lovers keeping the spirit of the Old West alive back East.

The solid new Netflix drama stars Idris Elba as Harp, an old-school cowboy living the life as the top cowhand at Nessie's Stables, a rundown horse haven and gathering place for local equine enthusiasts. They have a large empty field across the way for giving kids riding lessons, exercising their dozen or so horses and holding neighborhood festivals.

A few steps in any directions, though, and it's the familiar urban blight of tattered homes, liquor stores, poverty, drug deals and suffering. These cowboys, who highlight the trodden history of Black and brown folks like them who helped tame the West, know they are playing out their last string on borrowed time... but they'll keep riding it as long as they can.

The film, directed by Ricky Staub from a screenplay he co-wrote with Dan Walser, is at once sentimental and gritty. Caleb McLaughlin plays Cole, Harp's estranged teen son who gets dumped off at his row house by his mother after she becomes fed up with his constant scrapes with trouble. 

He's not a bad kid, but he's sliding down a long slope toward a sharp cliff.

Harp seems indifferent at first to Cole's presence. He offers him a couch to sleep on, and not much else. Harp has nothing but beer in the fridge and has a horse, Champ, squatting in his living room. To Cole, it seems like his pops cares more about the hooved resident than him.

Cole soon receives some tough love from the other cowboys, notably Nessie herself (Lorraine Toussaint) and Paris (Jamil Prattis), who wound up in a wheelchair -- not from riding but gangbanging. Cole is put to work shoveling horse poop and other menial jobs, and ever so slowly starts to ease into this adopted community.

Most of the horses are castoffs and headcases, such as Boo, a stallion the veteran cowboys are afraid to go near. But Cole finds an affinity for his fellow hothead, and together they manage to cool each other's temper.

He also runs into Smush (Jharrel Jerome), a childhood friend who gave up the cowboy life to run the streets. Cole instantly falls in with him, much to Harp's dismay, and they expand Smush's drug trade, bringing the attention of the local street boss.

It's clear Cole is going to have to choose between these two new ways of life, and it's here where the story becomes a bit rote and predictable. We know what's going to happen to certain characters long before they do, and it becomes an exercise in waiting around for the movie to arrive.

Still, I reveled in the colorful background characters -- many of them played by real-life Philadelphia cowboys (like Prattis). Some of the best moments are just hanging around a campfire, huffing on a harmonica, singing old songs and praising forgotten history.

Devenie Young plays Trena, another childhood friend all grown up into a fetching cowgirl. She's willing to give Cole a chance, after she's put him through his paces. Clifford Smith (aka Method Man) turns up as Leroy, a stable regular as a youngster but now a police detective. There's a tenuous peace between the stable crew and Leroy, knowing there are lines that cannot be crossed. Byron Bowers plays Rome, the chucklehead of the group who's still telling the story of the time -- one time -- he beat Harp in a race.

It's not a terribly meaty part for Idris, who hangs in the background more than I would've liked. Harp seems to have a very clear concept of himself, where he's lacking and when he has a right to strut. He knows where his range is and sticks to it. Part of him wants to be a good father, but he's also wise enough to grasp you can't pick up at year 16 and expect a smooth jump right out of the gait.

Even though the story could've stood to be a bit more innovative, there's a lot to like about "Concrete Cowboy." It's another page in the rich story of the Black experience in America, filled with degradation but also fierce pride and unfettered joy. Even though we ran out of new land to explore a long time ago, some are still out there riding along the edge of whatever frontier they can find.

 

Video review: "Selma"

“Selma” was a good but hardly great movie. The fact that it received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture seems more a nod to the weight of the historical subject it tackled -- the civil rights struggle that brought about the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- rather than the actual aesthetic merits of how they depicted it.

I found David Oyelowo alternately mesmerizing and off-putting as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Director Ava DuVernay and her star have talked in interviews about their deliberate effort not to perform an impersonation of King. But the cadence of his speeches is such an important part of his legend -- so when Oyelowo purposefully avoids replicating that timbre, it subtracts from the power of those scenes.

(The filmmakers also weren’t helped by being denied permission to use the actual text of the speeches, so screenwriter Paul Webb had to whip up facsimiles.)

By far the most memorable part of the movie is the depiction of the brutal “Bloody Sunday” encounter between peaceful protestors and Alabama state troopers. Harrowing and vividly emotional, this sequence brings the dry history out of the textbook and into our eyes and hearts.

Other scenes, though, become a flat parade of supporting characters who struggle to erect any kind of identity.

In retrospect, the hurricane of controversy over the film “only” receiving two Academy Award nominations seems ridiculous. (It did win for best song.) The reason it didn’t fare better during the awards season is because it’s just not that great a movie.

Certainly worthy of our time, but not fawning admiration.

The film is being given a sumptuous video release with a host of extra features, though you’ll need to buy the Blu-ray version to get most of them. The DVD only comes with a couple of educational featurettes.

The Blu-ray adds several making-of featurettes, a music video of “Glory,” photo gallery, deleted and extended scenes, and two separate commentary tracks: one by DuVernay and Oyelowo -- I always love it when actors join their directors for these things -- and the other with DuVernay and her cinematographer and editor.

Movie:

Extras:

 

Review: "Selma"

"Selma" has been mislabeled as "the Martin Luther King Jr. movie," which it is not, just as the three months of demonstrations for black voting rights in 1965 Alabama was not merely his doing. (Others had been organizing and protesting for two years before King arrived.)

The drama, directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Paul Webb, is a bit stodgy at times -- characters sometimes feel like they're reciting speeches instead of talking to each other. It also takes a bunch of well-publicized liberties with the historical record, such as depicting President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) as MLK's chief antagonist in opposing the Voting Rights Act, when the two coordinated closely.

(And it was Robert Kennedy who unleashed the FBI to spy on King on his cohorts, not LBJ.)

Still, it depicts several moments possessing great power, such as the recreation of the "Bloody Sunday" event in which state troopers ran down defenseless non-violent protestors marching from Selma to Montgomery. DuVernay brings to life the incredible struggles during the civil rights era, especially the pervasive sense of African-American being marginalized and oppressed.

Some of the quieter moments are the best, such as when a workaday woman (Oprah Winfrey) attempts to register to vote and is given an impossible citizenship test by the court clerk. (After correctly answering how many county judges are in Alabama, 67, she is instructed, "Name them.") The reality of Jim Crow would not begin to fade until hearts and minds were changed, not just laws passed.

I'm a bit ambivalent about the performance of David Oyelowo as King. Impressions are the shallowest portion of capturing a public figure's persona, but MLK's musical cadences during his speeches are so inextricably linked to his iconography that it's distracting when Oyelowo conspicuously avoids them. (Imagine someone playing Winston Churchill without the gravelly growl.)

Undoubtedly, some of this criticism is unfair. King is such a giant in our national heritage, the closest thing we have to a secular saint, that any attempt to depict him is fraught with all sorts of challenges. We bring so much baggage into the theater with us that watching the film becomes an exercise in separating our conception of him with what we see onscreen.

The movie depicts King as a man of great conviction but also one of cold calculation, who knew he was putting others in harm's way -- counting on bloodshed, even, to capture headlines and newscasts. In one somewhat shocking moment, he cheers the presence of a backward hillbilly sheriff, since he can be counted upon to split skulls and generate sympathy.

Webb's screenplay does a poor job of working in the other civil rights giants who organized the Selma protests, including James Bevel (Common) and Hosea Williams (Wendell Pierce). They wind up as a vague chorus of hangers-on and also-rans.

Stephan James stands out as John Lewis, then a college student beaten bloody during the march (and now a Congressman), as does Keith Stansfield as Jimmie Lee Jackson, murdered in cold blood by police.

It's rather disappointing that "Selma," directed by an African-American woman, does a rather poor job of representing black women in other than window dressing roles. Winfrey (also a producer) has little more than a cameo, and Lorraine Toussaint is a frequent, vivid screen presence who gets to say astonishing little. (Other than one contrived-sounding speech, she barely has any lines.)

Carmel Ejoga as Coretta Scott King is largely relegated to the home front, clutching and fretting over threats to her husband and children.

"Selma" is the sort of movie that earns respect but not ardor. It tackles a big subject, fleshes it out reasonably well, but labors to find the passion and beating hearts of those brave marchers in Selma.