Critics reviews

The first half generates excitement as it explores teenage life in 1980s Compton and brings the group together. Then F. Gary Gray's biopic switches gears and splits Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), and Ice Cube (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) into a tripartite version of a Hollywood serious-composer biopic like Rhapsody in Blue. When N.W.A breaks up the film becomes morose, bogged down in cameo parts, recriminations, and ugly management disputes.

A mostly enjoyable, sometimes shaky, musical–biopic... [It's] a movie that, despite its compromised provenance, deserves to have been made, not only for N.W.A.'s great songs and compelling story, but for how much fine art Dr. Dre and Ice Cube kept making after the group's demise.

If Straight Outta Compton were fully an hour shorter; if it were primarily about life in Compton, the band's early days and their relationship with a racist society; and for God's sake if it would just fess up a bit about the abuse of women, we might have something to be really excited about. As it is, if you're a fan like me you'll find big chunks of the film really compelling and the music as dope as ever, but it's hard to ignore the bitter aftertaste of dishonesty and hucksterism.

This is an origin story, the Book of Genesis for gangsta rap. The tales of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and DJ Yella braid prettily together, twisting and separating, full of gun-toting, woman-hating, and the prickle and burst of the masculine ego... Every song becomes a masterpiece, every tiff is a duel, every utterance has the thudding force of a manifesto. Straight Outta Compton is a single, drawn-out climax, the plot lurching from one betrayal or triumph or clicked trigger to the next.

In telling the N.W.A. story over a densely packed 147 minutes, Gray wisely plays it straight, favouring a propulsive, linear style unencumbered by the types of formal ostentation (fourth-wall breaks, overlapping voiceovers) that needlessly muddied other recent music biopics such as Get on Up and Jersey Boys.

Straight Outta Compton gets the little details right, the interactions, the various friendships, the arguments about money, the nuts-and-bolts of behavior, eloquent and unselfconscious, that is part of the reason I love movies. But it also gets the social and political aspect, something that demands to be addressed with a group like NWA.

The picture is an imposing, self-conscious epic, blinkered and celebratory, constructed with an Old Hollywood zeal for legacy preservation. It feels like a cultural milestone – a rags-to-riches story told with enough classical sensibility to lionise a movement that has long been vilified and marginalised by the mainstream cultural narrative. Indeed, the whole release feels like an old-fashioned studio package, carefully calibrated for maximum impact.

Despite the worst fears of the police and the political establishment, which Gray's film makes skin-pricklingly palpable, the spirit of gangsta rap isn't tearing the nation down – it's the very stuff on which the nation was built. If it hadn't already been taken, a great alternative title for this film would have been American Hustle.

Within the vigorous entertainment of "Straight Outta Compton" is a sharp-minded realism about the machines within the machines, the amplifiers of money and media that, behind the scenes and offscreen, play crucial roles in the flow of power.

Straight Outta Compton is so beholden to the appeasement of so many artists and legacies and estates that none of it coheres as a movie. There's no point of view — just the masculinized version of the generically entertaining bitchery you find on nighttime soaps. But should the story of five gangsta-rappers from Compton feel this much like Melrose Place?

Screenwriters Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff flirt with the idea of critiquing N.W.A.'s polarizing influence on society, but they divide the men too soon to touch on anything meaningful. They might have foregrounded the album's still-relevant theme of class injustice, but despite an electric beginning, they veer away into low-risk interpersonal drama. This movie about a group of risk-takers should have taken more risks itself.

The trick the movie pulls off is the same its namesake album achieved nearly 30 years ago. Straight Outta Compton functions as both a compelling, damnably topical political statement and a slickly produced piece of commercial art. Director F. Gary Gray shoots the streets of Compton and post-Rodney-King-verdict riots with searing believability, the concert scenes with energy to spare, and the exhilarating escapes and beatdowns with action-movie adrenalin.