Straight Outta Compton, a group biopic about the birth of gangsta rap, is excellent evidence that “group” and “biopic” are potentially mutually exclusive terms. The movie wants to tell the story of the young men who founded the rap group N.W.A., particularly O’Shea Jackson, Andre Romelle Young, and Eric Lynn Wright — or, as America knows them, Ice Cube (played by O’Shea Jackson Jr., the original Cube’s son), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), and Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) — during their early, controversial years of fame and fortune. But even at two and a half hours, the characterizations feel sketchy, the narrative arcs seem truncated, and none of the three leads ever fully stays in focus.
Which is not to say that Compton fails to entertain. The larger story is still fascinating even if the men themselves aren’t fully enfleshed. The gangsta-rap moment, prior to the genre’s domestication, was a rare case in which a pop-culture controversy intersected with real politics in a way that actually deserved the hype. And though the movie’s portrait of the controversy is inevitably one-sided, there’s enough material up on screen to let the other side seep through as well.
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