


Jason Mitchell is Eazy-E, Corey Hawkins is Dr. The cast is made up of many newcomers apparently chosen more for their resemblances to their famous counterparts than their existing work, but they acquit themselves just fine either way. It's electric - part getting-the-team-together, part let's-put-on-a-show, except the players are baby versions of iconic hip-hop artists, scrapping together revolutionary tracks using lyrics they wrote on the school bus and trying them out during a DJ gig for which they were instructed to play nice and get people thinking of "pussy, not pistols."
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The rise and fall of the group doesn't fit easily into the standard music movie mold, but Straight Outta Compton tries to stuff its complicated, triumphant-tragic elements into one anyway, shuffling away or diminishing some inconvenient parts of its main characters' pasts and designating a few villains.īut before all that, when Straight Outta Compton and its young, not-yet-famous men are just getting started, it's about as thrilling as movies like this get. This happens with every true story turned scripted movie, but history rarely feels as messily corralled as it does in the latter half of this one, which focuses on feuds and fights more than making hit records. The movie feels very much like the story of N.W.A as enabled by Dre and Cube, who got the prerogative of shaping what kind of tale gets told. Most of its subjects are still around (and a few are complaining). Music biopics usually wait until their subjects are deceased before turning their lives into the stuff of movies, but Straight Outta Compton, which starts in 1986 and continues through to 1995, forges boldly ahead with events that still come across as recent and raw. Gary Gray (who's worked with both previously, in Set It Off and Friday) and writers Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff. They helped shepherd it into existence and into the hands of director F. And also others, for sure, but Dre and Cube deserve first mention in this context, because they're not just two of the movie's subjects, they're two of its producers. Vibrant, rambunctious, and as lopsided as a cake taken out of the oven too soon, Straight Outta Compton lays out the epic story of N.W.A, the groundbreaking rap group that pioneered the incendiary sound of an era and birthed the solo careers of hip-hop giants Dr.
