MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Is Surprisingly Tame

Film: Straight Outta Compton
Starring: O’Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins
Directed by: F. Gary Gray

Straight Outta Compton is a lot of fun until it’s not.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Straight Outta Compton opens with a visceral depiction of life in South Central Los Angeles at a time when tension between police and the citizens of Compton was beginning to boil over into national headlines. Eazy-E, then just another street dealer trying to get by, is seen fleeing from police in the middle of a drug raid. Dr. Dre, otherwise known to family and friends as Andre, is looking for a job so he can provide for his girl and their soon-to-be-born daughter. Ice Cube, the main attraction for lack of a better description, is in high school. Their lives could not be more different on the surface, but due to the culture of violence that surrounds them on a near constant basis they are bonded by their individual drives to survive. They also connect over music, which provides a platform to share their reality with a world that is unprepared to hear it.

It’s in these initial moments that Straight Outta Compton leaps off the screen, grabs you by the collar, and promises to be something more than your typical celebrity biopic. There is a grit to the world these young men inhabit, whether it be the sleazy police who patrol the streets or the images of gang warfare that seem to haunt everyone on screen, and it’s intoxicating. The problem is, that high proves to be incredibly fleeting, and before long the film about America’s most notorious rap group begins to follow the same path that countless music biopics have in the past. Aside from the constant barrage of sex and frank discussion of street violence–which also wains as the film’s timeline runs into the 1990s–nearly every core element of this film could also be found in Ray, The Doors, Walk The Line, as well as any other memorable film about real life musicians. The music industry is a cold place where rotten people take advantage of true talent for exploitative purposes. Been there, seen that.

Had Straight Outta Compton chosen to focus on a specific period in the life of N.W.A. I think this film would have fared exponentially better. Attempting to cover everything from the inception of the group to the moment Dr. Dre decides to launch Aftermath Records is way too much to properly fit into a two-hour film. In order to explain what happens to everyone and all the ways those actions impact their individual lives, as well as the group itself, Straight Outta Compton has to move incredibly fast. This is good for keeping the story afloat, but not so great for those seeking something more than surface-level emotion. Everything comes and goes too fast to resonate, which forces the film to deliver reminders of why certain moments in time are important through music cues and fake celebrity cameos. For example, instead of focusing on the tension created between friends when Dre decides to join Death Row Records, the film introduces a young Snoop Dogg and has him perform a few bars of “Nuthin But A ‘G’ Thang.” Instead of dealing with Dre’s displeasure over how Suge Knight runs his label, we’re given Tupac and thirty seconds of “California Love.” It’s like clickbait storytelling, and after the third or fourth occurrence it begins to be a bit nauseating.

To be clear, I’m not saying Straight Outta Compton is a bad film. It’s rather fun, actually, but it’s not the dirty and raucous reinvention of biopics it has been marketed to be. Once the members have been introduced and their path to success outlined, the film begins to feel something like a theme park roller coaster. The thrills are there, but you never really feel any true sense of tension or engagement. You know everything will more or less work out, and even if you don’t there is not enough time dedicated to any one event in the group’s life to add real emotional weight to the images on screen. Even the news of Eazy-E’s illness, which ultimately takes his life, is so haphazardly mishandled it feels as if no one involved in the film wanted to actually deal with what realizing your friend of many years will soon die feels like. It’s as if Ice Cube and the others involved in production wanted the truth to be told, but only if they could focus on the best parts of the story, and that does not make for a well-rounded narrative.

What ultimately saves Straight Outta Compton is the performances of its lead cast, specifically that of O’Shea Jackson Jr. There would be a lot of pressure placed on anyone given the task of embodying someone as iconic as Ice Cube, but Jackson fills his father’s shoes so convincingly you might believe time travel was invented and used just to place young Cube into this film. Likewise, Corey Hawkins looks as much like Dr. Dre as probably anyone not directly related to Dre could, and he manages to convey the producer’s restrained, yet persistent drive to succeed with pitch perfect delivery. When Jackson and Hawkins share screen time the film is at its absolute best, and their strength is only intensified with the addition of Paul Giamatti as N.W.A. manager Jerry Heller. The real Heller was never asked to help with the film, so it’s difficult to tell how accurate Giamatti’s portrayal actually is, but his performance is good enough to make you believe his character really exists and that is all that matters.

Biopics are a tricky business. On the one hand, you want to portray the subject as something larger than life, yet still grounded enough to make a connection with the average moviegoer despite whatever cultural difference may exist between them. On the other hand, you have to tell the truth, and the funny thing about the truth is that it is rarely the most exciting part of any story. Straight Outta Compton sticks to mostly the truth throughout its 130-minute runtime, but as a result it struggles to reach the height of greatness a film capturing the lives of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy E should have been able to attain. With a little more focus on emotional beats and a little less time spent sharing awkwardly lip-synced performances this film could have been something fitting of the legends whose story it has to share. As is, Straight Outta Compton is passable, albeit ultimately largely forgettable summer entertainment.

GRADE: C+

Review written by James Shotwell

James Shotwell
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