"Concrete Cowboy" on Netflix, with Idris Elba, it's better than a western

We say, owl, a western, a little air.

It is not.

And it is perhaps much better thus, much more original than these imitations with the spur close to westerns of yesteryear that one sees resurface from time to time on the screens like pretty old copies.

"Concrete Cowboy" tells a true story, a crazy story, a tough and contemporary story, in the black ghetto of Philadelphia.

Upon discovering the first images of this very beautiful fiction, we thought that Fletcher Street and his black riders trotting or galloping between two roads and two city blocks in the urban setting of today's deprived suburbs, reminded us of something thing.

But yes, everything is true: in 2018, contemporary artist Mohamed Bourouissa made a documentary on these Fletcher Street riders, these magnificent outsiders and their western parades among the slums of Philadelphia, presented at the City's Museum of Modern Art. from Paris.

All this to say the thickness of this fiction and its three main characters: Cole (Caleb McLaughlin), a teenage delinquent offender well on the way to the big one, fired from all high schools, that his exhausted mother sends for the summer to his father. Harp (Idris Elba, still of great nobility in the game economy), who lives with Chuck… a nag!

"Do you have a horse at home?"

»Cole says when he finds this father, a former convict who has become wise and silent, whom he hardly knows and whom he immediately wants to flee.

It's because Chuck even lives placidly in the living room ...

Authentic Fletcher Street Horsemen in Philadelphia

A scenario find in a very real setting, painted by a number of secondary characters who we will discover that they are real life riders of the neighborhood.

Like that old man who still remembers the days when stallions replaced trucks in Philadelphia.

A black tradition to ride, to drive these teams.

Some have saved a few stables that miraculously survived it all, despite the real estate ogres' appetite for office buildings.

These are the two stories that "Concrete Cowboy" tells: the redemption of a son perpetually threatened by the association of a cousin who, him, definitively chose the camp of the outlaws, and of a father, but also the rage to live in a wild territory, perhaps of lawlessness but of a vibrant humanity, which has nothing but the nobility of a few thoroughbreds, surrounded by the police and the veterinary services.

You have to take the time to enter this film, to grasp its grace and urgency.

In Philadelphia, we finish horses well, we finish the marginalized too.

But to resist is first of all to gallop.

And discover all that animal life can bring us.

Transmission, respect for a past too, the horse having after all given a lot for man before the appearance of the train and other tractors.

There is in "Concrete Cowboy" a close-up of the eye of the horse that Cole took a long time to tame, face to face, which alone deserves to take a look at Fletcher Street, this essential anomaly.

EDITOR'S RATING: 4/5

“Concrete Cowboy”