F Gary Gray (2015)

It’s only fair to acknowledge that I went to see Straight Outta Compton outta a combination of duty and curiosity.  F Gary Gray’s film has been critically well received and is a huge commercial success:  within a fortnight of its US release last month, the movie had taken $180m – more than six times its budget.  For me, gangsta rap is something interesting to read about but punitive to listen to.  The experience of Gray’s film – which tells the story of the rise and fall of the seminal California hip-hop group NWA (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) – was therefore very different from that of many other screen musicals and musical biopics.  It’s not unusual, watching these kinds of film, to put up with the non-singing-non-dancing sections in the sure and certain knowledge that the next musical number isn’t too far away.   With Straight Outta Compton, I kept hoping, futilely of course, there wasn’t another rap on the horizon.

The remarkable socio-political context of the NWA story soon becomes no more than background to a familiar biopic dramatisation of frictions within a successful unit and its exploitation by money men in the music industry.  The many ‘motherfuckers’ and various other hip profanities in the script, by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff, aren’t enough to disguise how clichéd it is.  Most of the actors do a better job of concealing this because they’re often indecipherable.  The effect is sometimes like watching a biographical musical in a foreign language (and without subtitles) but this distance from what’s going on actually makes you more aware of the generic machinery that’s grinding round on the screen.  At 147 minutes, Straight Outta Compton is seriously protracted.   Not only was it pretty boring; once it was over, I just couldn’t understand how it could have taken so long.

Two of the original members of NWA, Ice Cube and Dr Dre, are among the film’s producers.  Ice Cube’s son, O’Shea Jackson Jr, plays his father and is OK.  So is Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E although I didn’t think either of them special.  Corey Hawkins as Dre is pretty dull.  Aldis Hodge (MC Ren) has the most interesting face of the actors playing the original group members; only a few days after seeing the film, I can’t even bring Neil Brown Jr (DJ Yella) to mind.   Keith Stanfield (who was good in Short Term 12 a couple of years ago) is Snoop Dogg.  Paul Giamatti has cornered the market in manipulative managers in this year’s pop biopics – albeit that Jerry Heller’s personality and motives in Straight Outta Compton are rather more ambiguous than Eugene Landy’s in Love and Mercy (and the wig is different).  Both Giamatti’s characterisation and his delivery of lines are admirably clear and expressive:  it seems hard on him that all this clarity does is expose how stale the writing is.  Even so, I thought the highlight of the film was the sequence in which Jerry Heller remonstrates with two Los Angeles police officers – one white, one black – who arrest the members of NWA in the street outside a recording studio, for no better reason than that they’re African-Americans and (therefore) might be up to no good.   This confrontation, well staged by F Gary Gray, has a frightening, combustible atmosphere.

8 September 2015