Straight Outta (2015)

Straight ahead … from left, Aldis Hodge as MC Ren, Neil Brown Jr as DJ Yella, Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, O’Shea Jackson Jr as Ice Cube and Corey Hawkins as Dr Dre. Photograph: Jaimie Trueblood/AP

The poster design pastiches the “Parental advisory explicit content” stickers that went on CDs back in the Tower Records era, and this is in some ways a boilerplate period music movie right down to the “epiphany” moment in the recording studio. It’s a high-octane recreation of the troubled, triumphant life and times of West Coast hip-hop pioneers NWA.

During the Reaganite 80s, when audiences might perhaps be coming to associate rap with Will Smith, race rage was building in South Central Los Angeles. The hard-pressed neighbourhood of Compton saw the sensational rise of the revolutionary hip-hop group Niggaz Wit’ Attitude or NWA – that retail-friendly contraction.

In this movie, Ice Cube is played by his son O’Shea Jackson Jr (an eerie resemblance), Dr Dre by Corey Hawkins, Eazy-E by Jason Mitchell, DJ Yella by Neil Brown Jr, and MC Ren by Aldis Hodge. The white characters are the hard-faced cops and slippery record company executives; Paul Giamatti plays their initial backer, the unreliable Jerry Heller – not a million miles from the role he played in the Brian Wilson movie Love & Mercy.

How NWA came straight outta Compton and went mainstream

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The movie fails to get perspective on the misogynistic culture of hip-hop and it incidentally allows to pass unchallenged the statement that no one involved had any concept of what “antisemitism” is (if you say so). It also coyly declines to show any of the main players doing so much as a speck of cocaine, a habit that surely drove many of the paranoid feuds, splits, outbursts and fist fights.

But the movie does a good job of showing the pure electric craziness of the music that NWA first produced: it shows how their angry lyrics were politicised but in a new kind of nihilistic, apoliticised, unaligned way, gatecrashing the white world of success, and how their most famous or notorious track Fuck tha Police became a free-speech issue and modern protest classic, resoundingly justified at last by the Rodney King video in 1991. It twists the volume dial clockwise.

Release Date	:	Aug 14, 2015
Runtime	:	147 minutes
Genres	:	Drama, Music
Production Company	:	New Line Cinema, Universal Pictures, Legendary Pictures, Cube Vision, Broken Chair Flickz, Crucial Films
Production Countries	:	United States of America
Casts	:	O'Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Neil Brown Jr., Aldis Hodge, Keith Stanfield, R. Marcos Taylor, Alexandra Shipp, Paul Giamatti, Angela Elayne Gibbs, Orlando Brown
Plot Keywords	:	brother brother relationship, california, hotel, aids, police brutality, hip-hop, vandalism, cocaine, drug dealer, nightclub,nudity, freedom of speech, protest, rapper, recording contract,music, concert, assault, contract, terminal illness, road trip, party,based on true story, profanity, beating, feud, tour bus, gang,marijuana, gangsta, box office hit, title spoken by character,police chase, f word, punched in the face, gay slur, hospital,racism, bare chested male, hip hop, new york city, death of friend, car chase, anger, title based on song, laptop, los angeles california, intimidation, racial slur, face slap, threat, no opening credits, rags to riches, wrongful arrest, pistol whip, death of brother, marijuana joint, rap music, milwaukee wisconsin, low rider, police raid, title appears in song, n word, police harassment, detroit michigan, duringcreditsstinger, record company, hip hop culture, mother son relationship, 1980s,critically acclaimed, husband wife relationship, hip hop music,gangsta rap, music tour, music manager, reference to rodney king, intimidation by police, los angeles riots, police helicopter,compton california, n.w.a, n.w.a.