4/5 Straight Outta Compton When making a biopic, one approaches a narrative fork in the road. Either you make a straight, point-A-to-point-B greatest hits story or you do something a little more unorthodox, such as focusing on a single year or touchstone in the subject’s life. I prefer the second option, because even though the focus is narrower, you often learn more about the subject(s) on a personal level. Spielberg had great success using this structure with Lincoln, as did Bill Pohlad’s more recent Love & Mercy. With the story of N.W.A., music's first gangster rap superstars, director F. Gary Gray disappointingly takes the easier route. Straight Outta Compton is a biopic of the slightly-whitewashed behind-the-music mold. We meet them at the inception of their genius and follow them until a death - here, it’s the 1995 death of founding member and assumed leader Eazy-E due to AID’s complications. In between those two points, we are served brief snippets that do not go much deeper than your average highlight reel. We have Eazy-E funding the first single with drug money, the meeting of the devious manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti, playing the same character he did Love & Mercy), the rampant police brutality that influenced (apparently immediately) songs like “F**k tha Police,” the celebrity excess, the infamous Detroit concert, the eventual split of Ice Cube, and so on and so on. | Director: F. Gary Gray Starring: Paul Giamatti, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell Writers: Jonathan Herman, Andrea Berloff |
If that seems like a long list of points, it’s because it is. That sentence does not even contain half of the bullet points the 147-minute film covers. The scale is epic, and the film would have been a failure if the subjects, and their music, were anything less than groundbreaking. Compton comes out on top because of the brute force and immediacy of N.W.A. and the music they created, both as a group and as solo artists. It does not hurt that the social injustices faced by Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, DJ Yella, and MC Ren are as vital now as they were then. The recent spike in unjust police killings in the past few years gives the film and automatic injection of fire and vitality.
Social politics and classic, chest-thumping music aside, Compton is also a technical success. The core performances are empathetic and endlessly watchable, especially that of O’Shea Jackson Jr., who plays his real-life father Ice Cube. Jackson Jr., the splitting image of his father, nails Cube’s emotional intensity and comes out the movie’s MVP. That is not to take away from Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell, who play Dre and Eazy. Mitchell, in particular, gives a late-in-the-game emotional punch as Eazy comes to realize he isn’t long for this world. The narrative gets a bit mushy at this point, but Mitchell’s performance never falters. Neil Brown Jr. and Aldis Hodge come along as Yella and Ren, but they feel like the group’s two Ringo’s, for the most part.
Any big studio film that runs two and a half hours long usually makes me groan, and I admit I was a bit nervous walking into Compton; but Gray, who got his first directing gig with the Ice Cube-penned Friday, does the impossible and makes the affair fly by. Even when it is narratively flat, Compton is never less than hugely entertaining. From his in-the-moment studio booth sessions to the intimate scenes of brotherly bonding, Gray hot-wires every scene for mass impact. No scene better shows off his skills than at the ill-fated Detroit concert, where police ordered the group not to play “F**k tha Police.” Do they play it? Of course! When Ice Cube says, “Yo, Dre. I got something to say,” your blood starts pumping and you are nowhere but in that moment.
Social politics and classic, chest-thumping music aside, Compton is also a technical success. The core performances are empathetic and endlessly watchable, especially that of O’Shea Jackson Jr., who plays his real-life father Ice Cube. Jackson Jr., the splitting image of his father, nails Cube’s emotional intensity and comes out the movie’s MVP. That is not to take away from Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell, who play Dre and Eazy. Mitchell, in particular, gives a late-in-the-game emotional punch as Eazy comes to realize he isn’t long for this world. The narrative gets a bit mushy at this point, but Mitchell’s performance never falters. Neil Brown Jr. and Aldis Hodge come along as Yella and Ren, but they feel like the group’s two Ringo’s, for the most part.
Any big studio film that runs two and a half hours long usually makes me groan, and I admit I was a bit nervous walking into Compton; but Gray, who got his first directing gig with the Ice Cube-penned Friday, does the impossible and makes the affair fly by. Even when it is narratively flat, Compton is never less than hugely entertaining. From his in-the-moment studio booth sessions to the intimate scenes of brotherly bonding, Gray hot-wires every scene for mass impact. No scene better shows off his skills than at the ill-fated Detroit concert, where police ordered the group not to play “F**k tha Police.” Do they play it? Of course! When Ice Cube says, “Yo, Dre. I got something to say,” your blood starts pumping and you are nowhere but in that moment.