DN:FILM Phantom Cowboys
PHANTOM COWBOYS follows three teenage boys during pivotal periods of their young adulthoods. Nick, Larry and Tyler, all from small industrial towns, traverse environments defined in part by what they lack rather than offer. Nick, a football captain, plays in the hard desert dirt of central California; Larry hunts rabbits in the dense sugar cane fields of southern Florida; and Tyler races cars on mud tracks in West Virginia. Director Daniel Patrick Carbone introduces the boys as teenagers; each narrates his unguarded dreams and readily expresses hopes for what his future will hold. Then Carbone jumps forward: The boys, now in young adulthood, tell of who they've become during the intervening years.
Carbone, who shot this film over an eight-year period, is playing the long game. But his poetic contribution to the recent spate of films capturing the real-time flow of American young manhood—think “Boyhood” and “Minding The Gap”—is to offer the unique and bracing shock of a jump cut between time periods. Rather than easing into the evolution of character, Carbone takes us from point A to G.
Particularly affecting is how Carbone lets the younger voices play under scenes of the boys’ older selves and vice versa, evoking reflection on the nature of memory and the very experience of time. Heady stuff, yes, but much of the thrill of the film is its seamless flow between time frames. But if the technique is smooth, the disconnect between the younger kids’ dreams and their later stark realities can be jarring. Because Carbone so poignantly integrates stories that get at the ways place, family, and continuity provide critical structure for his subjects, he finally does nothing less than deliver a definition of what it means to be young men in America today.
Bonus Material:
Phantom Cowboy started as a thematic expansion of a short film (Annie Waldman's SO THE WIND WON'T BLOW IT ALL AWAY, 2008 watch here).