“I can make you legit.”
That’s the promise Jerry Heller, a veteran rock manager, makes to Eric “Eazy-E” Wright in an early scene in Straight Outta Compton, a mostly exhilarating biopic about L.A. hip-hop legends N.W.A. The phrase missing from the end of that first sentence is “…with the white people who hold all the power in the music industry.” It doesn’t need to be said. Even with talents as electric as Andre Young and O’Shea Jackson — future icons we’d come to know as Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, respectively — N.W.A. cannot cross over to the mainstream without getting past white gatekeepers. And if that means signing on with a backroom operator like Heller, the trade-off seems reasonable to five young men looking for a way out of the ghetto. They can renegotiate later.
Named after N.W.A.’s breakthrough album, the sprawling Straight Outta Compton is about many things: A watershed moment in music history, past and present racial tensions connecting Rodney King’s L.A. to Michael Brown’s Ferguson, the power of “reality rap” to tell uncomfortable truths and incite controversy. But above all, the film celebrates the All-American values of hard work and entrepreneurship. It pays tribute to black artists who made themselves legit, years after millions of album sales and sold-out arena shows failed to bring them real control of their careers. How do we know they’re legit now? Dr. Dre and Ice Cube produced this major-studio movie as a monument to their achievements.
There’s no getting around the self-mythologizing aspect of a biopic produced by its subjects and the way it papers over less heroic facts about these men, like Dre’s assault on journalist Dee Barnes. It would not be that cynical to call Straight Outta Compton an act of brand extension or a gauche attempt by hip-hop royalty to shape their cultural legacy.