There’s a pretty major flex at the start of “The Cowboy” when Crowley McCuistion is asked what he believes it takes to be a cowboy and when racking his brain for an answer, he tells director Andre Hörmann, “I’m trying to remember what I told you 10 years ago when you asked that,” and the filmmaker can oblige with footage of him giving a much more confident reply from when he was 11. You’d expect Crowley to be more poised as he ages, but the opposite proves true when Hörmann makes annual visits to Colorado with the expectation of seeing a budding rodeo star flourish in front of him, with his mother Farrah noting he was on a horse as early as three months old and trained for the ring by his older brother Yancie and his father Curt, only to watch the family fall apart when tragedy strikes.
Taking the time to observe Crowley getting back on the horse in an entirely different way than he could’ve anticipated, Hörmann has quite a rich subject for his latest documentary where Crowley’s upbringing may be a central focus, but who’s taking care of who is constantly shifting throughout. It would seem at first that Crowley came out of the womb ready to take care of himself, needing no help around the homestead to graft a grate onto the front of the family’s truck and entrusted with its keys to drive around to take care of other errands four years before he can even apply for his provisional license. School isn’t of interest to him when his heart is set on competing in rodeos and he’s already making money for himself, doing any odd jobs that are available with a strong work ethic passed along by his father. However, his future is thrown in jeopardy after the sudden passing of Yancie, who not only would saddle up horses for Crowley to ride when he was too short to do it himself just yet, but whose death leaves both parents overcome with grief and divorced soon after.
It is telling when Curt mentions that Yancie was more than a brother to Crowley, but almost a father as well, sounding less like a compliment to his older son than an admission of where he fell short with his younger one and the film wisely starts to make Farrah and Crowley’s older sister Chaney a greater part of the proceedings when they have a much less romantic view of how the men in the family have considered their strength to be showing little emotion. When Crowley has been raised to be self-sufficient, it’s fascinating to see over the course of years how he seizes upon his ability to be financially independent to place a distance between himself and the rest of his family so as not to expose himself to the fallout, a point Hörmann slyly accentuates by noting how many hours away from his original home in Olney Springs he is in every new location it introduces as Crowley becomes something of a nomad to find work, moving further and further away from any desire to compete in rodeos as well.
Packing a decade into a tight 90 minutes, there are a few places where the limits of what Hörmann could show – or perhaps even capture from his visits — are exposed, such as when there’s a shift in Crowley’s behavior that’s completely out of character between 2022 and 2023 that’s never fully explained and the film curiously keeps track of the run-up to the 2024 presidential election perhaps to make a larger point, though the film’s subjects only seem passively engaged at best. (On this front, Crowley’s constant professional hustle appearing to not amount to much more than running in place when he’s been earning money from before he was a teen, hailing from a low-income household, comes across as much more profound when it seems like social mobility is impossible in spite of his best efforts.) However, the longitudinal filmmaking yields plenty of rewards from Crowley’s physical appearance starting to reflect what he’ll carry on from his parents to the ambitions of his own that he starts to shed as he takes into consideration what he feels are his responsibilities to others and perhaps he ends up putting the lasso down, but “The Cowboy” as a whole is able to round up an extraordinary look at growing up.
“The Cowboy” does not yet have U.S. distribution.