Straight Outta Bedroom Analysis

• “Straight Outta Compton,” an exultant rap-to-riches story about the group N.W.A., opens with a blast of action-film braggadocio. It’s night sometime in 1986, and the group’s future headliner and fly in the ointment, Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), is taking care of shady business. With the camera dogging his steps so closely that you half expect him to shout “Heel,” he hotfoots it into a cramped, bleak house that has been prepped for maximum horrorfilm suggestiveness, with lighting as dark as a dungeon, a Welcome Wagon of tough-guy scowls and a she-devil who’s soon holding a shotgun next to a bare leg, her gat and her gam each loaded and lethal. The director, F. Gary Gray, has a modern commercial filmmaker’s sense of space and rhythm that’s announced
Mitchell and Mr. Giamatti consistently out-act the rest of the performers. But then Ice Cube sniffs around, calls foul and exits the group, becoming a hit-making singularity whose arguments with his old cronies play out in his music and sometimes in real fist-to-jaw action. Much of this is good, glib fun; sometimes it’s just glib, partly because Mr. Gray isn’t above recycling visual clichés, like the livin’-large bacchanals and their pinwheeling female buttocks. The partying is as bland as that in any all-purpose music video and feels more like another script signpost (and audience-pandering) than a serious attempt to get out what it means to be young, black, gifted, fabulously wealthy and much desired. Mr. Gray does far better when the story edges into heavier, more dappled realms, as in a terrific scene in which Heller is threatened by a thug thwho melts in and out of the night, and another jittery sequence in which the police harass Dre and the rest because, it’s suggested, they’re young black men. Crucially, the cop crew is more diverse than N.W.A. As that police diversity implies, there is far more to the