A scorching record of rap’s rags to riches
Straight Outta Compton
15 cert, 147 mins
★★★★ ★
Dir F Gary Gray
Starring O’Shea Jackson Jr, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Neil Brown Jr, Aldis Hodge, Marlon Yates Jr, Paul Giamatti
Straight Outta Compton begins and ends with a promise – and if you’re familiar with the album that lends its name to this firebreathing biopic of the gangsta rap group NWA, you’ve heard it before.
“You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge” is the pledge that opens the group’s 1988 debut album, and also the first and last words you hear in F Gary Gray’s film. The speaker is a then-23-year-old music producer called Andre Romelle Young, better known as Dr Dre.
On the record, it was a warning that the voice of America’s dispossessed black youth was about to become too loud to ignore. But bookending the onscreen action, it becomes a kind of verbal trailer – both for the chaotic 10year period encompassed by the film itself, in which the group rises, soars and self-destructs, and also for the two decades of empire-building and power-broking that followed.
Straight Outta Compton transcends what it first appears to be: a routine rags-to-riches story about five young, black Angelenos making worldchanging music and then being tossed in all directions by the fame, parties, sex, fury and betrayal that follow in its wake. That unsubtle stuff is all there too, of course, although the film so deftly expresses the sheer power of the group’s sound – its ability to cause riots, change fortunes, build up and destroy lives – that its more clichéd music-biopic moments are forgivable.
The young leads are as convincing as penniless outcasts as they are feuding millionaires. Ice Cube, NWA’s chief lyricist, is played by O’Shea Jackson Jr, the rapper’s uncannily similar-looking son, while Dre, their DJ and producer and Eazy-E, aka Eric Wright, a young drug dealer and founder of the Ruthless record label, are played by newcomers Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell. The film opens on Eazy clashing with a rival dealer in a Compton slum that’s about to be raided by law enforcement. The encounter and its fallout crisply establishes the power dynamic that rears up time and again: money and face are the two things no one in this world can afford to lose.
Here as elsewhere, Gray’s camera bobs and weaves around the action like a wary boxer, giving the story an athletic urgency. Even in its gentler scenes there’s a sense of constantly mounting energy and rising stakes.
The arrival of Paul Giamatti’s Jerry Heller, NWA’s white, Jewish manager, further complicates matters, not least because it makes the group acutely aware that even in the black music business, black skin can be a barrier to success.
Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff ’s screenplay is so sharp on race that you regret its lack of equivalent interest in sex. The film’s view of women as either anxious mothers or dancing groupies, with a couple of supportive wives to rub shoulders during the group’s downtime, is as dim as the worst of NWA’s lyrics.
But this sour taste is mostly overridden by the addictive chillipepper scorch and lasting relevance of the drama.