Straight Outta Compton is the film folks need to see before they attack the “Black Lives Matter” campaign. N.W.A. is a rap group whose art (and subsequent popularity) sprung as a direct result from L.A.P.D. overreach. Their lyrics were often inspired by police … hmmm, shall we say, “intervention” in the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s. It’s a shame this material is still relevant, but it is.
The N.W.A. playahs: Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), DJ Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) and MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) saw themselves as a super group — the irony being Eazy E saw himself as producer and ended being a front man by default (this part isn’t well explained; in the movie I saw, Ice Cube should have been the headliner from the start). Truth is you could make a movie about any of Cube, Dre or Eazy and have plenty of material left over; you can’t fault F. Gary Gray for lack of ambition. And the material that gave N.W.A. life almost entirely stemmed from negative interactions with the L.A. police.
Police in Straight Outta Compton are a consistent and somewhat omnipresent source of arbitrary malevolence. Thrice early on, one or more of the group is harassed for being present and nothing more. Are we to believe this actually happens or, more importantly, still happens? Hell, yes. This is the boyz’ perception; you can’t really argue that the police are not abusive in their eyes, all you can argue is that boyz’ perception is wrong. Whatchagonnado? Say they’re lying? Say their reality is screwed? It sure is, isn’t it? Their reality is screwed. When the Rodney King incident (a film plot point) took place, we were told many times that such police abuse was common; King was simply the first time it was caught on film.
Straight Outta Compton sees Dre and Cube as the talent — Dre as the visionary and Cube as the poet– Eazy can’t even find the beat when first given the reins, which is kind of hilarious. But Eazy becomes the “lead singer” so to speak and he’s the one targeted and isolated by eventual manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), who brought national attention to the quintet. Giamatti, who seems to have a fine collection of hairpieces these days, has essentially the same role he had in Love & Mercy: promote the artist, protect the artist, coddle the artist and, oh yeah, skim a little. And while both films found him guilty, I say the contribution of this role is undervalued – does N.W.A. take off without Jerry Heller? Impossible to say, but if you know who either Ice Cube or Dr. Dre is, Jerry is the reason. Compton makes Eazy slowest to jump from the Jerry bandwagon and practically calls him an Uncle Tom in the process.
In a way, Compton is a standard rags-to-riches biography – talent, ambition, catch-a-break, success, excess, pain … the difference here is Gray never lets us feel that the playahs are ever too far from their roots. Yeah, they can sell out Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, but in the eyes of the police they’re just another posse of riot-inciting punks. I loved the pure 
honesty involved in Ice Cube devoting an entire album to rebutting the now Cubeless N.W.A.; for all Ice Cube is on the verge of stardom, he’s still drawing from what he knows — that his former homies were totally gleaming the Cube.
For as much as there is puh-lenty of material to draw upon among these city-kids-turned-superstars, Straight Outta Compton is too long. There isn’t great reason to namedrop Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur other than to point out Dre is an awesome talent scout. This conflicts majestically against his post-N.W.A. alliance with street thug Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor). The need to come full circle with character development adds at least 30 minutes of otherwise unnecessary material. If you gotta know the full story, however, this is a great place to start.
Oh, and it’s so worth note that there was, indeed, a theater shooting this summer. It happened not in a screening of the politically charged Straight Outta Compton, but in the relatively benign and Caucasian-based Trainwreck. I am still patiently awaiting the conservative punditry denigrating the values of white people that led to such a disaster.
FrogBlog Notes: I spent much of this film saying, “wow, the guy they got to play Ice Cube really, really has Ice Cube down. I mean not only does he look so much like him; he also has the facial expressions.”
Yes, I’m a moron.
♪F*** the critique coming straight from this IBM
Couldn’t stand watching that film starring Eminem
And check another rapper so people think
That single celebrity translates to acuity
Duck that film, cause I ain’t the one
For a punk apprentice just acting for fun
To be writin’ on and exposition
I can type row to row in this position
F*** the critique ain’t got the time
To figure out another word to rhyme♫
Rated R, 147 Minutes
D: F. Gary Gray
W: Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff
Genre: Local boys make good, go to jail anyway
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Aspiring artists
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Cops
♪ Parody inspired by “F*** tha Police”
