Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. The story of pioneering L. Ice Cube , and Eazy-E Eric Wright ; and so the meaning, the urgency, at times the necessity of even the most obscene, vainglorious, and incendiary rhymes emerge with thrilling clarity. But Straight Outta Compton aims to cross cultures and sanctify the wisdom of the street β to make a universal underdog story. It succeeds on a visceral level. Directed by F. The cops manhandle and go nose-to-nose with young black men, their attacks a test of manhood to be met with casual defiance, with heads held high.
But damage is also done by other black men, who put their own pride on the line in dances of dominance and submission. Nearly every scene centers on intense negotiations for power and dignity. The film opens with a sequence in which dope dealer Eazy-E Jason Mitchell challenges a bigger, better-armed group of other dealers β until the LAPD rolls a tank through the side of the house.
Dre Corey Hawkins makes the mistake of razzing a Crenshaw Mafia soldier from a bus and gets a pistol cocked in his face. Their wariness and jitters are transmuted; by proclaiming their power, they become powerful. In some ways, making money and boasting about it is their art. Much of Straight Outta Compton turns on N. But for much of the film, writers Herman and Berloff along with Giamatti resist making Heller an easy villain.
He gets their music instantly. He pitches them fervently. He stands up to brutal, abusive cops You nββs supposed to be somewhere? The loser of N. Everything that makes his Eazy difficult to like in the first two thirds make him impossible not to pity in the last. Marcos Taylor , until Knight became positively Caligula-like. The film gives us another look at the beating of Rodney King β along with the legal exoneration of the officers who beat him.
One of the high points of the movie is in Detroit, where a particularly saturnine police chief orders N. What happens next, though, is superbly double-edged: pandemonium, brutal suppression of free speech, band members seized and thrown into the back of a van.
