Rap group N.W.A were together for only a few years, but their legacy as hip hop pioneers remains unrivaled, launching gangsta rap into the mainstream and birthing the careers of hip hop mogul Dr. Dre and actor/producer Ice Cube. And now they’re the recipients of their very own big Hollywood biopic. Directed by F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job), Straight Outta Compton has a straightforward Wikipedia-style episodic screenplay, and it definitely suffers to some degree from some of the flaws inherent to that structure — but this is, overall, one of the most thrillingly entertaining films I’ve seen all summer.
Straight Outta Compton begins in 1986 in Compton, California, just south of Los Angeles. Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr., Cube’s real-life son) is a high school student who writes rhymes and dreams of getting out of the hood. Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins) is a 21-year-old underemployed slacker with a younger brother who idolizes him. He still lives with his mom, though he has a toddler to support. His mother wishes he’d get his act together, but Dre devotes all his time to DJing. Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), meanwhile, is just scraping by, selling drugs and hanging out with gang members. Late-‘80s L.A. is a difficult environment for them to thrive in — it’s a place where the streets are plagued by gang warfare, where police officers routinely brutalize black youth for no reason.
Cube, Dre, and E — along with a couple of friends, DJ Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) and MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) — begin recording and performing a harsh new kind of rap that glorifies violent gang life and condemns the authorities that oppress their community, a response to the culture that bred them. Soon enough, the group (calling themselves N.W.A) attract the attention of a big-time manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), who vows to make them mainstream stars, and he does. Compton follows the members of N.W.A through the highs and lows of their music career — their meteoric rise to fame and fortune, threats from law enforcement and the FBI as a result of their hit song “Fuck tha Police”, nasty contract disputes, bitter feuds they develop amongst themselves, a tragic encounter with the AIDS epidemic.
The film adheres fairly closely to the typical greatest-hits biopic structure, resulting in a narrative that’s largely a series of significant episodes from N.W.A’s career, rather than a single cohesive story. But what episodes! There are several scenes early in the film that explore the group’s relationship with the authorities — being humiliated by the police and forced to lie facedown on the ground for no reason other than their being black, willfully disobeying orders from Detroit police not to perform “Fuck tha Police” — that positively crackle with energy. Screenwriters Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff (Berloff also shares story credit with S. Leigh Savidge and Alan Wenkus) do such a remarkable job of defining Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E as characters — and also Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor) — that the stakes always feel enormous, and the defeats totally crushing.
With Compton, DP Matthew Libatique (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) gets his most impressive showcase to date outside of an Aronofsky film, and he shines most in the grittier, stressful moments — such as the opening sequence that introduces Eazy-E. When the gang house/drug den that E is visiting gets busted (and I mean that literally — the LAPD tears the front wall of that house right down), he escapes by leaping out of windows and jumping over roofs, and Libatique captures the mayhem with jaw-dropping shaky-hand-held intensity. It’s visceral and frenetic and engrossing and one hell of a way to open a movie. No other scene quite matches the brilliance of that first one, but Libatique proves himself to be good at everything: his police confrontations are brutal and disorienting; his decadent hip hop pool parties are kinetic and sexy and impossibly sunny.
But credit must also be given to the perfect cast that Gray has assembled. Jackson has so much personality and soul as Ice Cube; much of the film’s focus is upon him, and he knocks every scene out of the park, which is hugely impressive considering that this is his first film. He also looks so much like his father that you sometimes have to actively remind yourself that this is not actually archive footage. This is without question one of the most confident and natural performances of the year. Mitchell, meanwhile, exudes menace and cockiness and entitlement as Eazy-E, but he never forgets to locate the vulnerable man hiding underneath all that braggadocio.
Not every character, alas, is brought to life in such a vivid way. DJ Yella and MC Ren are presented as amiable sidekicks instead of the legitimate founding members of N.W.A that they are. Brown and Hodge do their best with the roles, but the two characters are never given interior lives or storylines. And sadly, the women in this film fare even worse; forget being actual characters — they’re lucky if they’re anything more than a single personality trait. Dre’s mother is concerned… and that’s about it. E’s wife is kind and good at accounting. And I can’t be sure whether Cube’s wife even speaks any lines.
The film covers roughly nine years in the lives of its characters, but it doesn’t do the greatest job of conveying such a long passage of time. This is the biggest downside of the Wikipedia-style biopic. The filmmakers try so hard to cover all the most important moments, but the end result invariably feels like a collection of vignettes. I’ve never been much of a fan of this structural choice for a biographical film, but, in Straight Outta Compton, it mostly works. Despite some unavoidable flaws, the film emerges triumphant in more ways than one. It’s merely a collection of Great Moments, but every single one of those sequences works on both a visceral and emotional level. It counts Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E’s widow among its producers, but it presents its characters as the real, messy, complex, flawed men they are/were instead of resorting to hagiography. I suppose, if we must continue to endure Wikipedia biopics, Straight Outta Compton is about as good a film as we could hope for.
