Everything that makes his Eazy difficult to like in the first two thirds make him impossible not to pity in the last. was, of course, Eazy, and as magnetic as Hawkins’s and Jackson’s performances are, it’s Mitchell’s who comes to dominate the film. The portrait has been vigorously disputed by the real Heller, but, as Amos Barshad reminds us in a Grantland Heller interview, “History is written by the winners.” In other scenes, though, Giamatti telegraphs Heller’s duplicity, his eyes signaling his lies. He stands up to brutal, abusive cops (You n-–s supposed to be somewhere?”) outside the recording studio in Torrance, California - among them a black officer who can’t conceive of rap being “art.” He treats Eazy with genuine tenderness. But for much of the film, writers Herman and Berloff (along with Giamatti) resist making Heller an easy villain. ![]() Despite his reassurances (“Everybody knows how important you are, Ice Cube,” says Giamatti in his basso purr), he favors Eazy - who promptly sells out the more talented Dre and Cube. Much of Straight Outta Compton turns on N.W.A.’s relatively swift dissolution, here blamed squarely on their manager, Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), whose strategy is divide and conquer. In some ways, making money and boasting about it is their art. They’re something more to flaunt onstage. At the first whiff of a breakthrough, they say, “Let’s go get this money.” The conspicuous consumption and scores of unclothed women are not a by-product of the group’s celebrity. Their wariness and jitters are transmuted by proclaiming their power, they become powerful. Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.!) - who supplies all the rhymes - bristles from the start at being shortchanged.īut the chests of these three men - plus DJ Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) and MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) - visibly swell when their music starts coming. (I thought the cops saved the young fool’s life, actually.) Dre (Corey Hawkins) makes the mistake of razzing a Crenshaw Mafia soldier from a bus and gets a pistol cocked in his face. The film opens with a sequence in which dope dealer Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) challenges a bigger, better-armed group of other dealers - until the LAPD rolls a tank through the side of the house. Nearly every scene centers on intense negotiations for power and dignity. ![]() But damage is also done by other black men, who put their own pride on the line in dances of dominance and submission. 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. Gary Gray from a shapely, often subtle script by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff, the film depicts a world that’s a series of confrontations, one swiftly following the next. But Straight Outta Compton aims to cross cultures and sanctify the wisdom of the street - to make a universal underdog story. I know, millions of people didn’t need a biopic to understand that urgency - or need, for that matter, my white-mansplainin’ of the roots of gangsta rap. 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. It’s how the movie makes you see the world through the eyes of Andre Young (a.k.a. ![]() It’s the density of detail - along with jagged, hand-held camerawork that evokes a war zone - that renders the trauma universal. It’s not the music itself that puts the film over, although hard-core bangers like “Fuck tha Police” still trigger both your exultation and fight-or-flight response. (as dictated and co-produced by the now-bazillionaire N.W.A.’ers themselves), Straight Outta Compton is among the most potent rags-to-riches showbiz movies ever made. Photo: Jaimie Trueblood/Universal Pictures
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