HIP HOP HISTORY
Biopic energized by comparing race relations in 1987 to today.
There is a great deal of pleasure in watching destiny so conspicuously arrange itself
Straight Outta Compton
The dilemma of the biographical film is the choice between reality and license. Cleave to the facts and you risk a lumpen form — a story too beholden to life’s ungainly contours. But sculpt the facts into a more attractive semi-fiction, and you undermine the truth — and with it the appeal of the subject to begin with.
A certain tendency toward mythmaking is inherent in the biopic style. And Straight Outta Compton, naturally, obliges convention with the necessary legend-printing flair. We are well aware of the stratospheric fame that awaits Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), and Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), among other associates of N.W.A., and we’re meant to keep that mind when, say, Alonzo Williams (Corey Reynolds) dismisses Dre’s interest in “reality rap” as a colossal waste of effort, or when family members caution that a career in music has no future. Well, that’s hindsight. We know better than the skeptical do that a fortune lay in N.W.A.’s near future.
Here even accidents seem in lockstep with fate. Take the recording of Boyz-n-the-Hood. As Straight Outta Compton tells it, Eazy-E had never rapped a bar in his life, and only stepped to the mike on a dare, halfdrunk, after the MCs hired for the track stormed out.
Mitchell plays the scene insouciant, even glib, tossing on a pair of wraparound shades and throwing himself into the song with a sort of jokey abandon. But when the film cuts from the booth to the single proper, the effect is thrilling — we suddenly realize that an icon is born. Twenty minutes earlier we found Eazy shaking down a pair of crackheads for some outstanding payments, pistol in the back of his pants and both barrels of a shotgun in his face. Now it’s clear that his talent as a gangster and a rapper share an impulse. For Eazy the roles were inextricable.
There is a great deal of pleasure in watching destiny so conspicuously arrange itself. Puttering around school, scrawling rhymes in a spiral notebook, spinning records at the local club. You get the sense seeing the routine unfold that their rise to superstardom could not have happened any other way.
Of course the reservations of the disbelieving are answered by history. But coursing beneath the biographical is a political doubt with more damning contemporary echoes. Black men in America in the 1980s were beleaguered by police: unjustly detained, inexcusably harassed, jailed or beaten or shot for simply walking down the street. Three decades later the situation is the same. Time hasn’t resolved anything.
Race looms over Straight Outta Compton, and provocatively so. The LAPD is relegated to a force of faceless, dwarfing villainy, like a zombie army or new strain of supervirus. A clutch of them swarm into an early scene outside a recording studio, disrupting without cause the creative harmony of the Straight Outta Compton album sessions for an idiotic — and unbearable — demonstration of authority. When Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), the group’s manager, steps outside to find the guys sprawled on the sidewalk with their hands laced above their heads, he angrily protests. “You can’t arrest someone for how they look,” he barks, as Dre and Cube share a knowing look. For Jerry it’s inconceivable — “disgraceful,” as he sneers to the cops — that anyone should be treated this way. But the N.W.A. crew know better. That’s just how race relations stand in the United States in 1987. The film poses a question: are things any better in 2015?
This run-in with the rebarbative law yields a gem in the following session: F-ck Tha Police, the group’s bestknown and most controversial track. The film mounts a compelling case in its defence. The director, F. Gary Gray, splices in archival news reports on rap music from the period — alarmist hand-wringing from a lily white news media that comes off ludicrously quaint. Gray is very smart about skewering N.W.A.’s detractors: he humiliates them with quotation. Riding into town for a sold-out stadium show one evening, the group spots from their tour bus a rally against F-ck Tha Police, where hundreds of their CDs and LPs are demolished by steamroller. “They can do whatever they want with them,” Eazy-E says, sagely. “They bought the damn things.”
The dissent reaches its apotheosis at a show in Detroit, where our heroes are informed by one of the cops on hand that the city forbids them to perform F-ck Tha Police, under penalty of arrest. They perform it anyway. The film makes the case, persuasively, that this is no small act of political defiance — a galvanic middle finger to the toxic status quo. Its consequences bear out the claim to bravery.
At moments like this Straight Outta Compton veers perilously close to hagiography. The film, it’s worth mentioning, is produced by Ice Cube and Dr. Dre. No mention is made, as others have pointed out, of the group’s history of domestic violence, and while the creative decisions are the filmmakers’ to make there is risk in that silence of erasure. But a more concrete problem emerges in the film’s final 30 minutes, as Eazy-E falls ill. Curving toward tragedy has always been the biopic’s conventional third-act gambit, but here it extinguishes the film’s most reliable virtue: its exhilarating, infectious energy.