![]() N.W.A’s career had more drama than even a typical squad of pop stars, and there’s enough material in their story to easily fill an entire cable miniseries. But they were still tackling issues that few other acts in the pop sphere were even getting close to-certainly not the alternative rockers held up at the time as the “voice of a generation,” who never had to contend with having a mob of LAPD thugs rough them up for simply hanging around outside the studio. N.W.A may never have had the critical respectability that Public Enemy did, and they may have commingled their political rhetoric with a heavy streak of rank misogyny. The group’s lyrics, and their unexpected popularity with white kids, had the establishment rattled enough to call congressional hearings, and it doesn’t take Kendrick Lamar’s appearance (in a wholly unnecessary victory lap during the credits sequence) to connect what was happening in 1989, when “Fuck tha Police” vented the frustrations of a black community under constant assault from a racist paramilitary police force, to the post-Ferguson movement protesting police violence against black bodies that’s adopted Kendrick’s “Alright” as its anthem. On the other hand, though, the N.W.A guys often lived up to their self-made image as First Amendment revolutionaries by speaking bluntly and vividly about subjects like police violence, systemic poverty, and the corrosive effects of the government-backed crack epidemic on black communities. looks almost exactly like his father, but also because the role involves re-creating some of his dad’s adventures with groupies. And Cube is played by his real-life son, which is bizarre-not just because O’Shea Jackson Jr. The film slides right past the group’s more objectively reprehensible moments, like when Dre physically assaulted journalist Dee Barnes, for example. (All apologies to MC Ren and DJ Yella, but.) The story has the pace of someone running down a very long checklist with not enough time, leaving little room for nuance characters speak almost exclusively in the Very Important Talking way of people in biopics.Īnd the fact that Dre and Cube both served as producers on the film essentially guaranteed that Straight Outta Compton would be at least a little self-indulgent. Dre, and Eazy-E-from before their breakouts all the way through their first successes as solo artists after their collaboration imploded. The new N.W.A epic Straight Outta Compton is no exception: It attempts to trace the career arcs of not one but three iconic artists-Ice Cube, Dr. Squeezing the full story of a noteworthy career into a two-hour movie all too often requires unflattering shortcuts-and the final products also frequently tend toward hagiography. As a form, the rock-star biopic is pretty deeply flawed.
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