Straight Outta Compton
Straight Outta Compton takes us back to inner-city Los Angeles in the latter half of the ’80s, to the gang-violence and brutal policing policies of Compton, California’s streets. There we meet Eric “Eazy-E” Wright (Jason Mitchell), a hard-edged drug dealer who’s running out of luck when it comes to avoiding death and/or jail. Eric’s friend Andre “Dr. Dre” Young (Corey Hawkins) is a local DJ dreaming of hip-hop glory, while weighted down by the burdens of being a father and struggling to make ends meet. Dre’s friend O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) is a gifted hip-hop poet just trying to survive daily life as a Compton youth – but when he and Dre unite on stages at local clubs, it’s clear that their “hardcore hip-hop music” is something special.
When it dropped in 1988, N.W.A.’s first studio album (from which the movie takes its title) shook the hip-hop world from its solid East Coast moorings with its button-pushing, madly rhythmic depictions of thug life in South L.A. — an ur-text for the subgenre that would become known as “gangsta rap,” though N.W.A.’s members themselves preferred the term “reality rap.” Along with Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” (released the same year), “Compton” was the album that fully announced hip-hop as the rage-filled protest music of its era — a primal scream from under the boot of white authority, or what the critic Nelson George called “the full-blown sound of revolution.” The group’s charismatic 19-year-old rapper and lyricist O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson (played here by his real-life son, said he and his bandmates were merely “street reporters,” filing dispatches from the from the front lines of a resource-starved community engaged in trench warfare with the Daryl Gates-era LAPD. Everything about N.W.A. was confrontational, starting with their name (short for “Niggaz With Attitude”). Straight Outta Compton Red Band Trailer
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Straight Outta Compton Review
Straight Outta Compton is a standout entry in the biopic genre, masterfully crafted by F. Gary Gray into an inspiring tale of musical aspiration amidst overwhelming adversity. The intermittent surge of pulsating energy from each recognizable song is enough to get you lipsinging and moving.
However, like most biopics, the attempt to cover so much life (and in this case, milestone events) in the span of a feature-film results in a slight thinning of focus as the movie goes on. With so many famous characters to follow, and so many well-known events to cover (or not cover), the movie ends up sacrificing thematic focus for selectively episodic (and flattering) visits along its subjects’ path to stardom. Like N.W.A. itself, Straight Outta Compton starts out with something important to say, but ultimately loses its message as egos and fame cloud the vision. Though the movie starts with eyes on Eazy-E, it’s in fact Dr. Dre’s story that takes over in the third act, while Ice Cube becomes something of a side character in the proceedings. That shift is jolting, as the raw honesty at he beginning of the film morphs into a more carefully-tailored depiction of Dr. Dre’s biography. As such, hip-hop fans with long memories will notice how certain aspects of history (like the true ugliness of the Dre/Eazy feud, or the producer’s more infamous scandals) are downplayed to make certain characters (Dre in particular) appear more heroic, while other characters (like Marion “Suge” Knight) are depicted as unequivocally villainous.
The recap of the members influence and what they have accomplished in the end was immaculate , but felt sort of like an agenda to distract from the deeper scars and sordid realism that transpired Adequate focus was not centered on other N.W.A. members DJ Yella and MC Ren. Neil Brown Jr, leaving us to wonder if due to Dre and Cube involvement producing the film, they were favored who gets more camera time- which is a given. But to gauge the film on its own merit devoid of the historical inaccuracies, Straight Outta Compton is a prodigious contrive biopics with the right 'beats' to keep you jumping. Straight Outta Compton gets 8.7/10 |
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