as I was making this movie, because I was on my side of town going through what I was going through, and I didn’t necessarily know what they were going through until I started to interview them and research and rehearse.” “There were things that I discovered making the movie,” Ice Cube recently told The Daily Beast. Even the players that lived through all the glory, strife, beatdowns, beefs, and brotherhood didn’t necessarily have the same memories of their shared history. “reality” rappers a sheen of glossy Hollywood mythmaking. Leigh Savidge.īut the attempt to lionize subjects Cube, Dre, MC Ren, DJ Yella, and the late Eazy-E while vilifying its antagonists-manager Jerry Heller, Death Row Records’ Suge Knight, cops, the press-tends to give the saga of the O.G. history into a script credited to Andrea Berloff, Jonathan Herman, Alan Wenkus, and S. Along with a soundtrack loaded with dozens of classic cuts from the dawn of West Coast rap, the film packs plenty of N.W.A. Gary Gray ( Friday, The Italian Job) directs the period biopic with an insider’s eye and a nose for emotional gut punches that key into why the story of five young men from South Central rapping about police brutality and hood unrest in 1988 still resonates today, in an era of Trayvon Martins, Michael Browns, and Sandra Blands.Īnd Ice Cube, who jumped on an early version of the script back in 2009, is one of Straight Outta Compton’s six producers alongside Dre and Tomica Woods-Wright, Eazy-E’s surviving wife who’d inherited Ruthless Records from him after his death in 1995. So it’s no wonder the ambitious and sprawling Straight Outta Compton plays a little fast and loose with details as it recounts the explosive rise, bitter breakup, and enduring impact of the seminal gangsta rap group behind incendiary 1988 anthems like “Gangsta Gangsta,” “Straight Outta Compton,” and “Fuck Tha Police.”

That’s a lot of rap Rashomon to wrangle into one cohesive Hollywood biopic. It took four surviving members, four writers, several scripts, one legacy-wielding widow, and nearly three decades of acrimonious history to bring the story of hip-hop legends N.W.A.

Eazy e straight outta compton movie