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.

Holding out for a hero

Winona Ryder and Oscar Isaac

It’s one of those glib clichés that people trot out about HBO. The novelistic nature of the network’s storytelling invariably has someone fall back on the old trope that if Dickens were alive today he’d be writing for The Wire or The Sopranos.

I think it makes more sense to accept that if the creator of The Wire, David Simon, had been born 200 years ago he’d be writing serial stories for magazines just as Dickens did.

Dickens and Simon are cut from the same cloth; Dickens the chronicler of the working class in Victorian England, Simon the chronicler of blue-collar America in the new millennium. Simon obviously did not grow up in the same privation as Dickens but he knows whereof he speaks and years spent as a Baltimore journalist working the crime beat have given him a unique insight into modern America.

His latest drama Show Me a Hero substitutes Yonkers in New York for Baltimore in The Wire and the much under-rated The Corner, or New Orleans in the, for me, slightly overpraised, Treme. But it is once again the perfect backdrop for Simon’s storytelling. My favourite run of shows on The Wire was probably the second half of series 3 and the whole of season 4; these were the programmes that explored the politics of Baltimore, especially the US school system which, in Simon’s world, is merely a supply line to provide soldiers for the drug barons.

This peculiarly local aspect of US politics is something that Simon returns to in Show Me a Hero, an eight-part series from HBO based on a true story. Most of Simon’s work is thinly fictionalised but this is based on real stories of real people. Set in the city of Yonkers in New York it deals with the city’s response to a court judgement to order public housing – usually inhabited by poor black people – in predominantly white, working class areas. The resulting furore almost split the city in two.

Simon is famously one of the new generation of ‘Difficult Men’ in TV terms and this is a difficult subject. On one side he looks at the lives of the people whose lot will be improved by the homes, on the other side there are various white protest groups, and in the middle is the local authority which has no option but to comply with the court order or the city will effectively be bankrupted.

Beleaguered Republic mayor Angelo Martinelli is under siege, his Democratic rivals put up a bright young candidate Nick Wasicsko as little more than a sacrificial lamb. However there is an opportunity to ride a wave of public ill-feeling right into the Mayor’s office which is exactly where we find Wasicsko at the end of the first episode.

There is a huge amount to admire in this show. Its low key narrative is not for the hard of thinking, the story is not handed to the audience on a plate. They need to work for it but the rewards are there in some beautifully drawn characterisation and some fine performances not least from Oscar Isaac as Wasicsko.

This is the latest in a remarkable 18-month run of performances from Isaac in films such as Inside LLewyn Davis, A Most Violent Year and Ex Machina. This is a trifecta which personally makes me think he is the most exciting American actor since Robert De Niro. There is no doubt that Isaac is the best of his generation and the first great screen actor of the 21^st century. With the work he already has. plus upcoming roles in the new Star Wars and X-Men films, he also seems able to move from mainstream to independent fare with commendable ease.

His performance in Show Me a Hero reminds me of two of De Niro’s great roles; Johnny Boy in Mean Streets and Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas. He has the drive of Johnny Boy and the smarts of Jimmy the Gent and it is an exciting combination.

This is a show that will confirm Isaac’s reputation but it also provides some opportunities as a career reviver. Watching James Belushi in a serious role in his middle years is a revelation, and the show also reminds us how much we have missed the glacial delicacy of Winona Ryder. Behind the camera too there is a chance for a career reviving turn from Paul Haggis whose career has been - to be kind - patchy in the ten years since his double Oscar success in Crash and Million Dollar Baby. Haggis brings a cinematic eye to proceedings and in sharing Simon’s working class ethos he paints an entirely convincing picture of life in a small American community at a time of great social upheaval.

In screenwriting terms the function of the hero is to lead the viewer through the story; everything we discover we discover through this character. So far Wacisko appears to be a perfect hero. The first episode ends with him having achieved his life’s ambition – it’s a small life, to be fair – but I suspect he will soon learn to be careful what you wish for in case you get it.

Not much style and absolutely no susbtance

Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill

Not to bang on any more about The Fantastic Four than I did last week, let me just take a moment to talk about the first issue of the comic book which was published in 1961. It starts with a flare being fired into the sky, a crowd of anxious onlookers, and a shadowy figure firing the flare. Within the next three pages all four members of the quartet have been revealed and their powers are on display. Only when we are well and truly in the thick of things – or in media res as they say in screenwriting textbooks - do we get to find out who they are and why they are turning invisible, bursting into flames etc. By that time we are well and truly hooked.

It’s great dramatic story telling which is almost impossible to do in the modern comic book film; it takes more than half the movie for us to see any of their powers in the new FF film for example. This insistence on the origin, the foundation myth, the getting the gang together sequence has become de rigeur for the cookie cutter mentality of the modern comic book movie. I don’t especially like it but I can live with it, however I don’t see the need to take it anywhere else.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the latest big screen incarnation of a Sixties TV hit. The TV show was one of the coolest programmes ever made; the two heroes, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin were American and Russian spies who were working together for a new super organisation called U.N.C.L.E.

Played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum respectively they rode the cool crest of the James Bond wave. And why not? Bond creator Ian Fleming was involved in the creation of the show which brought super spy adventures into your living room on a weekly basis. They had guns, they had girls, they had gadgets, but most of all they had fun.

So why then would you make a big screen version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. without U.N.C.L.E.? The organisation does appear but, literally, over the closing credits. What we have here is an origin story we neither need nor want.

In TV land Solo and Kuryakin were suave, urbane and charming. Robert Vaughn was an established movie star but McCallum was an overnight teen sensation. Young women adored him, young men copied his fashion and his haircut. They were style icons.

So why then would you cast Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer – two of the most charismatically-challenged actors in the business – in these roles? Why also turn Solo into a criminal being blackmailed into his espionage work or, even worse, turn Kuryakin into a psychotic thug with daddy issues prone to violent rages. And worst of all, why would you turn this slick piece of entertainment into a tone-deaf, thick-eared, thud and blunder spy story?

Not only that; it’s a badly done spy story. The plot about a CIA agent and a KGB agent teaming up to stop former Nazis getting a nuclear bomb is dull beyond words. Every line uttered by either man fairly drips with exposition. There’s no characterisation, just information for the chronically hard of thinking which would appear to be their target audience.

Speaking of target demographics, this film seems completely out of synch with the contemporary audience. There’s a lame attempt to explain the Cold War over the credits while the whole film stops for a newsreel montage when one of the villains mentions the Second World War; presumably to convince those who hadn’t heard of it that it was a very bad thing.

As the sort of film maker who likes to remind you he’s there Guy Ritchie directs with his usual vigour, rather like a small child demanding you pay attention to his latest trick. It’s as if constant forward movement will distract from the lack of substance but the direction is so toneless and haphazard that the film has no sense of cohesion. Unlike, for example, the Mission: Impossible franchise The Man from U.N.C.L.E. completely abandons the spirit of the original; it doesn’t even use the original Lalo Schifrin TV theme which was every bit as recognisable in its day as the Mission: Impossible theme, also written by Schifrin.

Obviously Guy Ritchie gets off on Sixties Italian chic, hence the clothes, the locations, and the sub-Morricone score, but despite all that the film ends up looking like an M&S fashion shoot only a bit less interesting.