If there’s one question worth asking after the credits roll on F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton, it’s “Why didn’t he make a series instead of a film?” Next year, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger will roll out Vinyl, a ten-episode series on HBO that focuses on the developing aural confluence of hip hop, disco and punk rock in 1970s New York. On paper, Gray’s movie wants to be exactly that for legendary rap group N.W.A., but he only has 130 minutes to cover almost a decade’s worth of happenings. Disadvantage: Gray.
The imbalance hardly matters now: We’ve been given Straight Outta Compton as cinema, and as cinema, it mostly succeeds. Originally, the idea of Hollywood turning the story of N.W.A.’s culture-shifting influence into a summertime biopic raised red flags. How can an industry with such a massive race gap tell N.W.A.’s history with the integrity and urgency it demands in 2015? How can a business that’s largely curated by whites do proper justice to a seminal rap album designed around critique of systemic injustice against black Americans? The tale of how N.W.A. became N.W.A. isn’t just about people making music—it’s about the music itself, and what that music meant to its authors as well as audiences around the country. Above all else, the message matters, even 27 years later.
In Straight Outta Compton, that message remains surprisingly intact, but it’s smushed hagiography and an exhaustive collection of filler. The film has as many heroes and villains as it does human beings, with Ice Cube (portrayed by his son, O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) and Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins) fulfilling the former parts, and Suge Knight (a wild-eyed R. Marcus Taylor) and Jerry Heller (an out-of-his-depth Paul Giamatti) the latter. In the middle, there’s Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), who spends the film fighting for his soul, and in the margins, MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), and DJ Yella (Neil Brown, Jr.) are given little and less to do, observing players in their own biography. (And if you’re waiting for mention of female cast members, forget it. The women here are either mothers, wives or playthings.) So Straight Outta Compton isn’t quite as brutally honest and realistic as it ought to be, in other words, but Gray’s blunt presentation of the film’s most prominent themes—especially his examination of how white-run enterprises tend to use black talent for personal gain—is impressive, even if the structure holding it up isn’t.
At its worst, the film is agonizingly biopic-ish. At its best, it’s a rise-and-fall movie where the first half is infinitely more compelling than the second. Straight Outta Compton follows the trajectory of N.W.A.’s individual members as they cut one of the all-time greatest records in rap canon before crumbling over contract law squabbles and hurt feelings. Gray, who directed Cube back in 1995’s Friday (which earns more than a few in-joke references here), makes large stretches of the behind-the-music narrative pop before, almost inevitably, the script sputters out. Such is the nature of the biopic: They jam too much “stuff” into too small an artistic space, and the results legitimately, overtly feel compressed.