Straight Outta Compton

NWA. image: Broadway
 

It’s easy to see why Straight Outta Compton was both one of the most highly anticipated films of 2015, and subsequently one of the biggest box office successes of the year.  N.W.A’s popularity remains enormous worldwide; their influence is still felt in the music industry, as is the continued success of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre.

Director F. Gary Gray has made a stylish, slick and engrossing biopic of the outfit, particularly when examining the group’s origins and rise to success.  He doesn’t shy away from showing Eazy-E’s life as a drug dealer, nor the violence and police brutality (albeit a little heavy-handed and overly simplified) that shaped the social message of N.W.A’s creative output.  Gray gets brilliant turns from a superb leading cast that does much more than impersonate their characters. As Ice Cube’s son, O’Shea Jackson Jr. seems an obvious choice to play his father, but any notion of nepotism is soon justified with his performance.  Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell as Dre and Eazy-E are equally impressive, as is the always-great Paul Giamatti as the group’s manager, Jerry Heller.

It’s in the second half that the film starts to struggle a little.  It falls into the unavoidable pitfalls of most music bios: the goofy moments of finding ‘their sound’ that seem present in any origin story from The Doors to Jersey Boys, with the ubiquitous producer sagely nodding behind the sound proof glass.  Also, with Dre and Ice Cube as producers, the film seems to stray into uneven territory when presenting the group’s downfall.  Heller, and to a lesser extent Eazy-E, emerge as villains, which though may well be the most accurate representation, still smacks of a feeling that was hard to shake throughout the whole film: that it’s little more than a hagiographical application for musical Sainthood for the surviving members.

There’s also something to be said for the dichotomy between how innovative and risk-taking the group were in a time of social strife, and how safe the film plays it at times.  Its solid opening gives way to something more formulaic, and overly long.  It never ceases to be interesting, and is very often fascinating.  But it’s just lacking something that’s hard to nail down.  Perhaps the story is too big for its running time, and Gray simply tried to cover too much of the band’s timeline rather than focusing on one aspect in particular.

For N.W.A fans Straight Outta Compton is a long overdue study of one of the most influential rap groups in history.  For a middle-class white tit from the mean streets of Ilkeston, who is largely unfamiliar with anything other than five or six of their best known songs, it was an interesting, although flawed account of their meteoric rise and subsequent falling apart.

Straight Outta Compton is showing at Broadway until Thursday 10 September.

Straight Outta Compton trailer