The boys from the hood

O'Shea Jackson Jr. as his dad, Ice Cube

Full disclosure. I’m one of those people who have always assumed that rap music is spelled with a silent ‘c’. Part of that is a rejection of the attendant culture, of which more later, and part is just because I’m not much of a fan of the music. You can imagine my enthusiasm as I sat down to watch  F. Gary Gray’s biopic of N.W.A Straight Outta Compton.; you can similarly imagine my surprise when I found myself enjoying it, or at least sizable chunks of it.

This film does an excellent job of providing some context for the lives of the group of young men who came together in the face of extraordinary levels of intimidation, harassment, and downright brutality. The story begins in 1986 when the LAPD had run out of ideas for dealing with West LA suburbs like Compton so they effectively behaved like an occupying force. The LAPD was a hammer so every social problem became a nail and life for everyone became consequentially miserable. Pressure built up and a few years later the Rodney King verdict was the catalyst for an outpouring of rioting and violence. 

Before that however a group of five young men, in their late teens and early twenties, had become the voices of a generation with their music. As NWA – Niggaz Wit Attitude – Dr Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, DJ Yella, and MC Ren became a focal point of the rage and frustration of their peers. It was a genuine sound of the streets and it carried with it a raw, primal energy. This at a period in Ronald Reagan’s America when mainstream music was at its blandest; the black artists dominating the charts were Lionel Richie, Dionne Warwick, and Janet Jackson. These were not the songs that spoke to the Boyz N the Hood generation.

The film does a terrific job of capturing the energy of that period. The concert scenes crackle with tension and dynamism, especially the gig in Detroit where the police decided enough was enough and they were going to teach these young men a lesson. Or so they thought.

Where the film is less sure is in its characterisation. By focusing on three of them – Eazy, Dre and Ice Cube – the narrative is unbalanced and the film is far too long as each character fights for screen time. At times other characters, including group members, revolve around these three like interchangeable ciphers, not so much characters as plot points. O’Shea Jackson Jr is probably the best of the performers which is perhaps not surprising since he is playing his dad, Ice Cube. The others tend to blend into the background.

Paul Giamatti, as their manager, gives the film’s most memorable performance as a man who is robbing them blind, playing them off against each other with Machiavellian sophistication, and at the same time loves them like sons and claims he is acting in their best interests. It’s a remarkable balancing act.

Narratively the film falls down in its final act. As the group splinters the stories fragment and it moves into conventional biopic territory. All of the energy of the first two acts is dissipated as we get into a round of chronological box-ticking; this happened, then this happened, and then this happened. The result is a procession of largely unearned emotion and a hasty summing up over the credits.

There’s a lot of stuff that is only hinted at that I would like to have seen fleshed out, for instance how does Dr Dre go from being an angry young man to a business tycoon who sells his company to Apple in a multi-billion dollar deal. That’s a story that surely deserves more than an end credit title card.

The most depressing thing about Straight Outta Compton however is its sanitisation of rap culture. There are no drugs, guns are mostly for ornamentation and are seldom fired in anger, and the rampant misogyny is dismissed in a couple of party scenes which, to be fair, are disgraceful. F. Gary Gray deals with all of this with the gloss and vacuity of one of his hip hop videos. Fair enough that’s how he started in the business but, to me at least, it diminishes what should be a more powerful and nuanced film.