Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9.5/10

Cast: O’ Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Neil Brown Jr., Aldis Hodge, Marlon Yates Jr., R. Marcos Taylor, Carra Patterson, Alexandra Shipp, Paul Giamatti, Elena Goode, Keith Powers, Joshua Brockington, Sheldon A. Smith, Keith Stanfield, Cleavon McClendon.

Regardless of what you feel about Rap/Hip-Hop or any of the divisions contained therein, Straight Outta Compton is one of the most brutal, interesting and creative films of the year. A film which for which many might find uncomfortable viewing, some perhaps even painfully so, but it is the flesh that is opened up, the topics of discussion which have un-nerving parallels with American society today which makes it a must see film.

For anyone who was in America, natural citizen or wandering visitor between 1986 and 1993, who saw the building tension and simmering wanton distress caused by the heavy handed and outrageously vicious treatment of young black men on both sides of the America by law enforcement, it would come as no surprise that five men from the district of Compton would take their wrath and burning anger and turn it into something raw, something unprecedented, something that took a match to the petrol being poured in the inner cities and blew the minds of millions of young black men and women right across the country.

Straight Outta Compton is the story, sanitised in a couple of places, fierce, unruly, untameable, overwhelmingly violent and harsh but never betraying its values or intent, of the rise and fall of the group N.W.A., a group so crucial to reflecting the downpour of racial hatred that was springing up like a volcano after many years of dormant behaviour and which threatened to engulf all with the toxicity that was seen smoking its way like snake like, this was the perfect storm in which the N.W.A. back drop of music and opinion was greeted.

There is no getting away from the uncomfortable viewing, and that is the point of it, that sense, especially from a British perspective, of wanting to see N.W.A.’s position on what was happening all across America at the time and leading up to the disgraceful scenes that greeted television viewers with the beating by police of Rodney King and yet tempering it against the violence, the gun law and the language, are all there to remind cinema goers that once you start treating people with no respect, once you start taking apart their lives with force and threats, of course they are going to fight back and they will do exactly to society what society has done to them.

With stirring performances by O’ Shea Jackson Jr. as his father Ice Cube, the consummate Paul Giamatti as the band’s manager Jerry Heller and Jason Mitchell’s awesome performance as the troubled Eazy-E, Straight Outta Compton is a film of incredible magnitude, it doesn’t just resemble what was going on in that decade of music powder keg delivery, it blows certain myths and stories straight of the water. This was the America that many found in parts if they travelled to the country and found themselves in places like Harlem or any other inner city neighbourhood, it can only be hoped that the provocation that formed the N.W.A. in the first place will never be allowed to take place again.

A towering film that no matter your views on Rap-Gangsta culture and music is deserved viewing.

Ian D. Hall