Straight Outta Compton

(MA15+) ★★★★½

Director: F Gary Gray.

Cast: O'Shea Jackson Jr, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Aldis Hodge, Neil Brown Jr, Paul Giamatti.

"Are you sure the band name fits?"

BACK in 1989, there was no piece of music more incendiary or volatile than NWA’s Fuck Tha Police.

These days, with music so freely available to everyone via the internet, and offence served up and taken on a daily basis everywhere, it’s kinda hard to fathom the impact one piece of music could have, and how it could serve as such a lightning rod for trouble or stir up so many people.

If Straight Outta Compton only dug into the context and repercussions of that song, it would still be a fascinating film. The fact that it gives so much more, stylishly exploring an important time in American music and American history through the eyes of five flawed but talented individuals, makes this a truly great music biopic to rival the best of the genre.

NWA barely lasted as a band for five years, but this film explores 10 years in the lives of Dr Dre (Hawkins), Eazy E (Mitchell), Ice Cube (Jackson Jr – Ice Cube’s real life son), MC Ren (Hodge), and DJ Yella (Brown Jr), with much of the focus on the first three (who were admittedly the three key members, but it’s worth noting Dre and Cube are producers on the film).

Straight Outta Compton shows the band’s humble beginnings, where Dre’s production talents, Cube’s rhymes, and Eazy E’s money and bravado help set them on their path, and follows them as they partner with manager Jerry Heller (Giamatti), who would prove to be the key to both the band’s success and downfall.

Along the way, NWA sell a few million copies of the album that gives the film its name, attract the unwanted attention of the FBI, and ultimately break up, inadvertantly kicking off the East Coast-West Coast rap war that would create some awesome music at the expense of too many lives.

It’s the perfect backdrop for a biopic. In a setting of drugs and police brutality that culminates in the Rodney King beating and the LA riots, we see how this kind of music came to be and why it struck a chord around the world, but we also get the drama of the interpersonal relationships, which escalate from money squabbles to diss tracks and full-blown feuds. There are the highs of the parties and success, and the lows of the violence and the tragedy of Eazy E.

None of this would work without a solid cast, and hats off to the casting department on this one. Not only does everyone look passably like the people they’re playing (Jackson Jr looks so much like his old man it’s unnerving) and even manage to rap like the people they’re playing, but there are some damned fine performances in here too, particularly from the key trio of Hawkins, Mitchell and Jackson Jr. Throw in Giamatti to balance it all out as the demonised (perhaps rightly so) Heller, and it’s an excellent cast that deftly keeps the situations from flying into melodramatic territory, while making everything feel legitimately “street”.

Much has been made of what the film leaves out, in particular Dr Dre’s disturbing assaults on a number of women. While Straight Outta Compton doesn’t shy away from many of the characters’ readiness for violence or their objectification of women, it leaves out the truly heinous stuff and gives everything a slightly cartoonish quality to ensure we keep barracking for these guys.

This softening of the subject matter and the slightly bloated running time are probably the only major flaws of the film, but at least it throws a little bit of a cautionary tale in among the glamourising.

But we can only really judge the film for what’s in it and not what was left out, and largely this is a superbly acted and neatly distilled look at an important band in the history of hip hop and music in general.

F Gary Gray’s direction is great, mixing some up-close handheld stuff with a couple of bravura long takes, and the soundtrack, as expected, is bangin’. There is a fidelity to the era that’s impressive too. The concert recreations are awesome and combined with the uncanny appearances of the lead actors it gives the whole thing a feeling of “being there”.

All “true stories” mess with the truth, and Straight Outta Compton can be forgiven for that because it captures the time, the music and the band at its heart in such engaging fashion.