Story by S. Leigh Savidge & Alan Wenkus and Andrea Berloff
Screenplay Written by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff
Directed by F. Gary Gray
**** (four stars)
RATED R
Epic, incendiary, sprawling, and profound, "Straight Outta Compton," Director F. Gary Gray's enormously entertaining and brutally unflinching musical biopic of the pioneering rap group N.W.A. ferociously dominates the silver screen and even transcends its own cinematic genre over and over again and to a degree that is nothing less than outstanding.
For a film I initially had no interest in seeing as I was never a fan of N.W.A. (I was more of a Public Enemy/Boogie Down Productions man), and also fearing that the film would only exist as some sort of exploitative vanity project for former N.W.A. collaborators and film Producers Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, I am thrilled that I believed the hype set up by early rave reviews and ventured out to see this film. Dear readers, if any of you happen to be harboring any doubts whatsoever, let me excitedly inform you that "Straight Outta Compton" is explosive cinema, a vehemently thrown cinematic brick through the windows of rampant cliches, hollow sequels, and an artistic and socio-political disregard to the lives of the Black community, especially regarding the police harassment and the unrepentant violence committed against it. Yet alongside the righteous fury, F. Gary Gray ensures that his film is intelligently and artfully multi-faceted and multi-layered, making for a film experience that is overwhelming in its riches. Trust me, "Straight Outta Compton" is not to be missed!
"Straight Outta Compton" chronicles the rise and fall of N.W.A., abbreviated from the intentionally controversial moniker "Niggaz With Attitude," from its origins in 1986 Compton, CA when musically obsessed DJ Andre Young a.k.a. Dr. Dre (played by Corey Hawkins), budding lyricist O'Shea Jackson a.k.a. Ice Cube (played by Cube's own son O'Shea Jackson Jr.), fast talking neighborhood hustler Eric Wright a.k.a. Eazy-E (played by Jason Mitchell) as well as lyricist/rapper MC Ren (played by Aldis Hodge) and DJ Yella (played by Neil Brown Jr.), formulated Ruthless Records as teenagers (initially funded by Eazy-E's drug dealer money) and recorded the rap flamethrower "Boyz N' The Hood," which immediately placed them on the musical map and captured the attention of music manager Jerry Heller (a terrific Paul Giamatti).
After Eazy-E hires Heller to manage N.W.A. and soon has the band signed to Priority Records, the label for which group created the iconic "Straight Outta Compton" album (released August 8, 1988), the film charts the band's meteoric rise which is indeed fraught with combined conflicts and hurdles. In addition to gradually rancorous group infighting due to contractual inequality between band members, N.W.A. also faces the increasing pressures from outside sources and influences from the mounting presence of Suge Knight (playing to menacing perfection by R. Marcus Taylor) and certainly the police and even the FBI after the band unleashes the molten lava protest song "Fuck Tha Police" out onto the world.
As N.W.A. breaks apart, with each of the three principal members of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E moving forwards separately, we also discover how they all found their way back to each other before Eazy-E's death in 1995 after a surprising battle with AIDS.
F. Gary Gray's "Straight Outta Compton" is a sensational film made with the same intensity and urgency as the music and rap group, from which the film is based, provocatively operated. Fueled with slick direction combined with an artfully meticulous attention to period detail and cinematic atmosphere, Gray, working beautifully with Cinematographer Matthew Libatique, faithfully re-creates the rap scene of over 20 years ago (with imagery Gray himself had a serious hand in creating as he was a celebrated music video director of the era) plus also the hazy, sun-drenched locale of Compton, CA which belies the poverty and desperation contained within, the embryonic cocoons of dark recording studios where N.W.A. created their iconic works, and also the grandeur of the stage and Bacchanalian excess of life on tour.
Gray certainly has his work cut out for him as "Straight Outta Compton" possess a complex historical and character driven narrative all contained into a massive 2 1/2 hour running time. Yet, Gray, with the precision of a laser beam, keeps his eyes on the prize from beginning to end, ensuring the proceedings remain completely understandable and intimately identifiable at all times. And furthermore, the film moves like a rocket!
Conceptually, "Straight Outta Compton" shares much with Director Bill Pohlad's outstanding "Love And Mercy," and not just with the intimidating presence of Paul Giamatti in the role of a Machiavellian Father figure in both films. Most certainly, F. Gary Gray has fashioned a film experience that speaks to not only the power of music as a source of redemption but as a means for survival itself, just as Pohlad performed with his impressionistic take on The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and for that matter, what Director Albert Magnoli magnificently accomplished with Prince's "Purple Rain" (1984), a film that often sprang to my mind as I watched "Straight Outta Compton."
Where Pohlad utilized the life of Brian Wilson to chart an exploration of debilitating psychosis into which he succumbed and eventually emerged from, and Magnoli utilized the life and mythology of Prince to explore themes pertaining to the cycle of abuse, Gray explicitly illustrates how the inherent artistic talents within the members of N.W.A. were the precise tools needed to try to escape their surroundings, an environment that has long existed to denigrate and destroy young Black males. This inexcusable reality provides the band's music, and therefore the film itself, with its combustible fuel and revolutionary spirit.
"Straight Outta Compton" presents a slice of African-American life that is as honestly presented and as politically charged as any moment we have seen before and since the likes of Writer/Director Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing" (1989). It is also ferociously searing slab of socio-political journalism and activism that makes the film work as a companion piece to both Director Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale Station" (2013) and undeniably Director Ava DuVernay's "Selma" (2014). Gray performs a subversive yet directly powerful job with his presentation of life in Compton, where communities have fallen due to the scarcity of jobs, the rise of crack, the fearsome lordship of gangs and the ever present surveillance, harassment and violence perpetrated by the increasingly dictatorial police and judicial system.
I particularly loved an early sequence in the film, where a teen-aged Ice Cube, who attends school in the San Fernando Valley, is compulsively writing lyrics in his journal while being bused back to his home in Compton. I loved how Gray very subtly showcases the changes in the environmental landscape and resources of the wealthy White community to the poorer Black community. Even the music that underlays this sequence makes subtle changes from the Euro-pop of Tears For Fears to the head nodding, war drum beats of hip-hop. And then, all of the scenery culminates in a near tragedy as school bus hijinks provokes a frightening drug dealer to enter the bus and place a loaded gun to the head of a student. But Gray, utilizing his artistic and journalistic eye, widens his cinematic lens from Black on Black violence to illustrate the larger issues that plague the Black community, most notably how guns and drugs are more readily available than jobs and progress.
The racial tensions that exist between young Black men and the police provides "Straight Outta Compton" with a palpable sense of moral outrage as it explicitly showcases what it means to be Black in America A scene where the band members of N.W.A. are continuously taunted, verbally abused and forced to lie face down on the Los Angeles streets (and directly outside the recording studio from where they are recording their landmark album no less) by a group of White and Black police officers, despite the presence and protests of Jerry Heller, was striking enough. But in addition to the sequences of young Back men being harassed and abused by police offices, and there are several, Gray also including a striking image near the opening of the film when a militarized Batter-ram explodes onto a Compton residential street. And of course, the film recounts the 1992 videotaped beating of Rodney King by four White police officers, their subsequent acquittal and the ensuing Los Angeles riots which culminated in not only unleashed volcanic rage but also a enraged unity against a greater enemy of copious police brutality and systematic racism as depicted in one of the film's most powerfully stirring images, the intertwined bandannas of warring gang actions marching in solidarity against the police.
To those who may feel that these scenes are gratuitous have completely missed the inhumanity on display and the boiling rage that such scenes SHOULD provoke in all potential viewers, especially with the rise of the current Black Lives Matter movement, itself born from the continuous systematic racism, police brutality and the seemingly unedifying deaths of unarmed Black people at the hands of the police. In regards to the subject matter of N.W.A., such sequences provide the viewer with the seeds from which the band's music was created in the first place. In one sequence, Ice Cube refers to himself as a journalist and at their very best, N.W.A. provided America with a viewpoint and perspective the mainstream media would never depict, therefore making the music of N.W.A. essential to the breadth of artistic expression as well as the breadth of our on-going political discussion. All of the film's musical/recording sequences and political sequences culminate in a concert sequence that allows the film to rise to near orgiastic heights as N.W.A., in a show of blazing defiance, perform the Earth shaking "Fuck Tha Police" after being instructed not to do so by the police and the F.B.I., thus completely violating the band's 1st Amendment Rights for Free speech and self expression. This is a sequence of riotous energy as we witness how the music IS the message and how artists and the audience forge a connection that is unshakable, no matter what obstacles are hurled.
And even then, F. Gary Gray's "Straight Outta Compton" probes further.
While the "reality rap" that originated N.W.A. quickly transformed itself into the violent, and often misogynistic and homophobic fantasies of "gangsta rap," the blurred lines of the genre have always been a quality that has troubled me. My feelings are such because what is depicted in song may indeed be a reality but not necessarily the literal reality of the performers themselves, thus presenting artifice inside of the truth, changing musical journalists into hedonistic super anti-heroes. This is a dichotomy that Gray is all too aware of and while I am not certain if he is utilizing sections of "Straight Outta Compton" to either fully embrace or critique this aspect of rap and hip-hop culture, the way I read the film, I think Gray leaned a tad heavier on the critique aspect. Or at least, he provided a larger perspective, the kind of which that arrives with aging and some distance from the time period.
There is no question that Gray exalts the art form and the artistic legitimacy of N.W.A. to it highest standard within the film but there are some areas in which we view the culture and songs from a different and more complicated lens. Yes, there are many party sequences within "Straight Outta Compton," and all featuring attained and discarded naked female bodies on display. Partially, Gray has used some of these scenes, especially the cruel "Bye Felicia" moment, to illustrate the hedonistic, unattended-kid-in-a-candy shop mentality of the rap tour as these teenagers are given the keys to the kingdom and the invitation to grab every single indulgence at their disposal. In those sequences, Gray depicts how the members of N.W.A. are given license to find ways to (almost) bring the violent lives and personas they have created within their music into a certain heightened reality.
Additionally, Eazy-E, always presented as a mastermind, consistently aware of every conceivable angle in order to elevate the cultural, musical and financial status of N.W.A., takes an "any publicity is good publicity" approach to any political pushback the band received, feeling that if kids knew that the F.B.I. didn't want them to hear N.W.A.'s music, then the kids will only demand it all the more.
But then, the film's later and hazier party sequences, after the band has already begun to fragment due to internal tensions, we can see how Jerry Heller utilizes the women, drinks, drugs and the constant flow of Dr. Dre's beloved Parliament-Funkadelic music on the loud speakers as an all encompassing anesthetic, blurring and even blinding Dre's own vision as to how he and his fiends are ultimately being used and swindled in the process.
As for the violence itself, we see how the band members (mostly) keep their vitriol, especially against each other, strictly within the confines of the music they create. A brilliant sequence, during which the already departed Ice Cube, feeling scorned by his former band mates on their second and final album, unleashes the scorched Earth funk of "No Vaseline," completely decimating all of his former associates, solely through the means of his lyrical agility, Watching the reaction of N.W.A. plus Jerry Heller upon hearing the song provides one of the film's many high points as well as dives into the film's true center.
The emotional core of "Straight Outta Compton" arrives with a thematic framework that echoes Writer/Director John Singleton's "Boyz N' The Hood" (1991), which itself was an echo of the N.W.A. song, and that is the friendship and combined evolution of the three characters of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E. This relationship, in essence, makes the film also function as a coming of age drama as we follow the trio from teenagers to adulthood. from kids with an idea to individuals who possess artistic and financial independence, and ultimately, the journey from subjugation to emancipation. Viewing the friendship, camaraderie, honor and brotherhood between these three figures who each wanted to find their respective ways out of their limited surroundings on their own terms, and then falling away from each other and returning to each other in the process, was much more moving than I thought that I would experience when I walked into the film. This is truly a testament to the three performers who have embodied the roles of Dre, Cube and Eazy with such skill, attention to detail as well as high reverence and three dimensional humanity.
It is simply eerie to watch O'Shea Jackson Jr. embody the spirit of his Father, Ice Cube so completely. He actually looks almost precisely as his Father did when he acted in "Boyz N' The Hood." But even so, Jackson Jr. works far beyond mere imitation and makes the character of Ice Cube come to life so vibrantly that I often felt as if I was looking directly into the window of Ice Cube's own past and memories. Even more impressive is Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre, a legendary musical figure who also possesses a certain unknowable status. In Hawkins, we not only see the drive and determination but also the musical dreamer as well as a figure who falls under the spell and/or antagonistic thumbs of three Father figures throughout the film before finally attaining true independence. As for Jason Mitchell, who stars as Eazy-E, I really believe that he has elicited nothing less than an Oscar caliber performance that completely runs the gamut from cunning to vulnerable, fearless to fearful, ahead of the curve to desperate and hopeless, all the while also growing up from child to full adulthood. The twists and turns Mitchell takes throughout the course of "Straight Outta Compton," sometimes all in one scene (a late film confrontation with Jerry Heller is especially powerful), is masterful and I deeply hop that he is handsomely rewarded for his tremendous efforts during awards season.
F. Gary Gray's "Straight Outta Compton" above all else is a music biopic that serves as a celebration of inspiration and the creation of art and music itself. The recording sequences contained in the film showcase the same unbridled euphoria that comes from unfiltered creativity, just as also presented in "Love And Mercy," thus making for a film that is consistency a roof raiser. But overall, throughout all of the concepts, themes, and layers, Gray has unquestionably helmed a towering achievement of a film that simultaneously speaks of the past and the present with grit, teeth and full blooded passion.
"Straight Outta Compton" is easily one of the very best films of 2015.
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