Cory's Reads #4: The Neo-Western Awakens
Directors Ricky Staub and Taylor Sheridan are shepherding in a new era for the Western genre
I’ve been writing about film for several years now. I’ve written about films I love, like the criminally underrated Bad Times At The El Royale, and films I hate — I remain particularly proud of my incisive takedown of Todd Phillips’ Joker. But the thing with writing about film, is that you need films to write about. Typically, this is not an issue. Much to my dismay, there are more movies out there than I will ever be able to consume in my lifetime. The past year, however, presented a rare crisis for film writers everywhere. The typical onslaught of cinema suddenly slowed to a gradual drip. With new releases few and far between, we were afforded the opportunity to look back and revisit old favorites, or fill in the gaps of our cinematic repertoires. I did as such when I wrote about Holy Motors for Film Cred, or suggested some alternatives to Pixar’s Soul on my own personal site.
Writing about film became only half the battle. First, you had to figure out what the hell to write about! And so I’d like to extend a hearty congratulations to film writers everywhere for surviving this recent dearth of new cinema. Your reward for your patience? More movies!
The global community is far from done with the COVID-19 pandemic, as I touched on in Cory’s Reads #3, but the influx of new movies in recent weeks is one of several indications that the universe is healing, slowly but surely.
An unfortunate side effect of this relative return to normalcy, however, is that certain films get lost in the shuffle. In 2020, streaming fodder like Palm Springs and My Octopus Teacher took on life of their own. In 2021, it seems, studios and streamers are pushing their big-budget material, allowing more independent — and often more intriguing — fare to flounder.
One such example is Ricky Staub’s Concrete Cowboy, which began streaming on Netflix on April 2nd of 2021, but only recently popped up on my radar. Perhaps even more incredibly, despite growing up with Philadelphia in my backyard, I had never even heard of the film’s central community: The Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, a group of Black urban cowboys. This tight-knit community of Black horseriders makes Concrete Cowboy an immediately fascinating and important film. While the plot ostensibly follows young Cole (a terrific Caleb McLaughlin) as he is sent from Detroit to live with his estranged father (a not-so-terrific Idris Elba) on Fletcher Street in Strawberry Mansion, director Ricky Staub resists the temptation to turn Concrete Cowboy into a run-of-the-mill fish-out-of-water story. The first half of the film certainly flirts with clichés, as characters espouse the virtues of hard work and tough love, but the second half of Concrete Cowboy cements it as a complex interrogation of the numerous issues that continue to plague Black communities across the United States.
With its city setting and unconventional cast of characters, Concrete Cowboy can be a difficult film to categorize in terms of genre. It’s a drama, sure. Cole and his father Harp are working through the kinds of conflicts we’ve come to expect from family dramas.
“Stay out of trouble.”
“I don’t want you hanging around that kid anymore.”
“You’re not my father!”
These moments are moving, but they don’t quite account for what truly lies at the core of Concrete Cowboy and its genre trappings. Believe it or not, Concrete Cowboy is a Western through and through. It may be set within the urban jungle of Philadelphia, squarely situated along America’s east coast, but Concrete Cowboy is a Western, and it knows that much is true.
Perhaps more accurately, Concrete Cowboy is a part of a recent wave of what film critics call “Neo-Westerns,” films that adopt the conventions of traditional Westerns, but apply them to new settings, conveying new sets of values in the process. Concrete Cowboy may not be the best entry in the Neo-Western genre (we’ll talk about the man responsible for that film in just a bit) but it just might be the most vital, uncapping decades of racial tensions and breathing new life into the most American of genres.
Indeed, Concrete Cowboy has everything we’ve come to expect from a Neo-Western. Horses. Stetson hats. Lawmen. And, tragically, violence.
I mention the tragic nature of the violence not because such tragedy is absent from other Neo-Westerns, but because Concrete Cowboy is particularly attuned to the ways violence is perpetuated by external forces to wrought terror and division amongst the Black community. One of the more peculiar yet impactful byproducts of setting a Neo-Western in North Philly is the constant awareness of a world beyond the film’s most immediate setting. With their expansive deserts and desolate landscapes, Westerns often put forth a nearly mythic vision of the American wilderness, placing particular emphasis on its capacity for isolation. Concrete Cowboy doesn’t have such luxury, and the events of the film are inextricably tied to developments in Philadelphia at large. Most notably, the film confronts the issue of land ownership. The City of Philadelphia hopes to develop along Fletcher Street, and consequently seizes the club’s horses to prepare the stables for demolition. The conflict establishes the Fletcher Street Stables as a sort of “final frontier” against the gentrification affecting low-income communities nationwide.
The right to own your own land should be one of the most basic rights afforded to American citizens, but even that is hampered by this country’s institutional racism. Fletcher Street’s fight for survival is far from a work of fiction. The real-life FSURC has put together a GoFundMe to support its push for a permanent home. Concrete Cowboy may tell a fictional story, but its central struggle is very much a fact. Staub recognizes this responsibility in crafting Concrete Cowboy, even if he and the producers behind the film have somewhat bizarrely created a separate GoFundMe for a set of stables to replace the FSURC. In addition to accomplished actors, Concrete Cowboy features several real-life members of the FSURC. Cowboys and cowgirls like Jamil Prattis and Ivannah Mercedes merge effortlessly with the ethos of Staub’s film, and lend a crucial sense of authenticity to the project. Prattis, Mercedes, and a few other riders offer further insight to the club’s work as the film’s credits roll, ensuring a clear bridge between the film world and ours. The inclusion of these urban cowboys is more than just a clever nod to the FSURC; it’s an emphatic reminder that these people exist, and deserve to keep on doing it.
As the characters humorously point out early in the film, Black cowboys accounted for roughly 25 percent of workers in what we colloquially refer to as the “Old West.” Because many of these workers were either freed slaves or the offspring of former slaves, they were often more skilled in tending to cattle or breaking horses than their white counterparts. Intense racial discrimination obviously persisted, but the cowboy life was one of the few domains where Black Americans could achieve some semblance of independence. The FSURC’s mission is to promote discipline and commitment amongst its inner-city youth via horsemanship, but it is also doing something more profound. The club is reclaiming a past that, like much of Black American history, has been erased or rewritten. Likewise, Concrete Cowboy functions as a Neo-Western not just because it features a bunch of men in neckerchiefs and cowboy boots, but because it focuses on characters whom the genre has ignored for far too long.
Staub’s responsibility as a filmmaker therefore extends beyond properly representing a single community in Strawberry Mansion. Rather, Staub is redressing the Neo-Western to accommodate Black audiences and Black characters in a way the genre is yet to do. Concrete Cowboy marks Staub’s feature-length debut, yet it is easily the most well-directed film of 2021 so far. Staub injects Concrete Cowboy with kinetic energy throughout, unafraid to make his camera’s shaky presence felt. It is almost as if there is a sense throughout the film that we are not supposed to be here, that Westerns don’t belong inside the walls of a concrete jungle. But that’s the point. Staub doesn’t care. He is rejecting a history of Westerns that would rather ignore — perhaps even replace — cowboys like those on Fletcher Street.
Indeed, Staub’s dynamic direction constantly considers the role of the “replacer.” One of my favorite moments in the film comes late in the runtime, when Cole and his friend Smush (Jharrel Jerome) are running from a cop (Method Man). The police offer, Leroy, is a former rider at FSURC, but is now pursuing the two young outlaws for their involvement in a nearby drug bust gone wrong. Staub captures Leroy chasing Cole and Smush through the lower level of a parking garage with a rapid series of cuts. The characters sprint past cement columns, and Staub cuts to each individual character as they do so. The result is disorienting. Who is chasing who? Where are they all in relation to one another? As far as the camera is concerned, Leroy, Cole, and Smush have essentially merged into one. Staub is implicating policemen like Leroy in the crimes he allegedly opposes. He needs criminals, creates them even. Leroy likely became an officer in opposition to the kind of crime he saw hurting his community. And yet, simply by participating in that system, he contributes to its survival. The developers aiming to demolish and replace the Fletcher Street Stables can comfortably disregard Cole and Smush as criminals, but their greedy attempts to displace them and several other Black Philadelphians is what forces them into a life of crime in the first place.
More often than not, Westerns abide by a rather strict set of morals. Only in recent decades has any sort of moral ambiguity become permissible in Western films, and lawmen in particular have almost always stood for what is morally good. The DNA of the Neo-Western genre at large suggests at least some deviation from these outdated moral binaries, but Staub’s take on the genre rejects them with a particular fervor that only this story and this community could demand.
Of course, that’s not to say Concrete Cowboy is the only recent Neo-Western of note. Genre aficionado Taylor Sheridan has a Neo-Western of his own out in theaters and on HBO Max: Those Who Wish Me Dead. Sheridan has already written a few of the greatest Neo-Westerns of all time, with 2016’s Hell or High Water standing out as my personal favorite. Like Staub’s, Sheridan’s work appropriates the conventions of the Western genre for a much more nuanced set of values. Hell or High Water sent a pair of Texas Rangers after two brothers on the run in order to consider the increasing obsolescence of oil and natural gas. Wind River tasked a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Tracker and an FBI Agent with solving the mysterious murder of a young indigenous girl, raising awareness for the disproportionate numbers of native women who are raped and murdered. Sheridan’s latest film doesn’t quite achieve the complexity or depth that he has previously demonstrated, nor does it possess the urgency of Staub’s Concrete Cowboy, but it remains a welcome addition to an otherwise barren cinematic landscape in 2021.
Those Who Wish Me Dead follows young Connor Casserly (Finn Little) as he tries to evade two deadly assassins (Nicholas Hoult & Aiden Gillen) amidst a massive forest fire in Park County, MT. It’s a deliciously pulpy premise that leads to some jaw-dropping moments, and recalls the kinds of mid-budget thrillers that dominated the box office in the mid-90s and early 2000s. And that’s the thing about Those Who Wish Me Dead. It’s something I had to grapple with for the first half of the film’s runtime. Like Concrete Cowboy and much of Sheridan’s oeuvre, Those Who Wish Me Dead employs the trappings of a Neo-Western. But unlike those films, it isn’t interested in recalibrating the genre. Believe it or not, sometimes it’s fine to simply watch a game of cat and mouse play out in the middle of a forest fire. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
Sure, Sheridan does seem to have a vested interest in the politico-media complex or small-town America with Those Who Wish Me Dead, as I elucidate further in my review of the film for Film Cred, but this neo-Western feels more like a love letter to its predecessors than a threat. While I likely prefer the ferocity of Concrete Cowboy, there is a place for both in cinema.
And perhaps both films are where they belong. Those Who Wish Me Dead may have underwhelmed at the box office, but the movie absolutely belongs on the big screen. I already regret watching it alone on my laptop. It’s the kind of thriller that would have a large audience screaming and cheering at its various peaks and valleys. Its box office rival Spiral has had more success welcoming audiences back to the theater, with its trademark blend of gore and, well, more gore. These may not be particularly lifechanging films, but they allow for memorable experiences. And right now, that is what the cinema needs above all else.
Concrete Cowboy, on the other hand, may be just a bit too quiet and subversive to carve out much of a theatrical presence. A streaming service like Netflix, however, can provide such a film with a necessary home. I only wish Netflix was supporting the film more, rather than the poorly reviewed Woman in the Window. I could stand up on my soapbox and complain about streaming services ad nauseum, but every once in a while I come across a hidden gem like Ricky Staub’s latest Neo-Western, and remember that as long as there are talented filmmakers pushing cinema into the future, there is reason for hope after all.