The Grand Self Mythology Of STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

(Dir. F. Gary Gray, 2015)

This super-sized (nearly 2 and a half hours!) biopic of hip hop legends N.W.A., co-produced by the group’s key members, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, is undoubtedly a work of grand self mythology. But since self mythology is a large part of the hip hop game, it’s hard to imagine it any other way.

The flashy, larger-than-life sweep to the story of how Dr. Dre, Easy E, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and DJ Yella - portrayed respectively by Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Aldis Hodge, and Neil Brown Jr. - rose out of the poor South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Compton is initially intoxicating; at times it feels like you’re a fly on the wall of a chaotic in-your-face party.

Of course, it’s a party that’s interrupted by the police every so often, as those infamous clashes with the law are a large part of what gave the West Coast gangsta-rap pioneers the moniker of “the most dangerous band in the world.”

In a role that’s not entirely unlike his part in the Brian Wilson biopic LOVE & MERCY – (i.e. the questionable manager/mentor archetype), Paul Giamatti plays Jerry Heller, a longtime music industry maven who befriends Easy E after the single “Boyz-n-the-Hood” makes a splash. Heller and Easy E start Ruthless Records, Heller lands N.W.A. a deal with Priority Records, and the band start recording the move’s 1988 namesake album “Straight Outta Compton.”

As per the formula, the film is broken down into a series of greatest hits highlights. The most effective of which is the sequence surrounding their signature anti-police brutality anthem “Fuck Tha Police.”

The controversial track was inspired by an incident dramatized in the film in which the group was harassed by asshole cops during the recording of their debut, and it caught the attention of the FBI. At a show in Detroit, N.W.A. is ordered by a local police chief not to play the song, but, of course, they defy the order and the audience goes from wildly chanting to rioting as cops rush the stage.

In between these energetic bursts of beat-filled energy we get a lot of complaining about not getting paid. Dr. Dre and the rest of N.W.A. bitch about not getting their contracts while Heller and Easy E are eating lobster dinners; after leaving the group, Ice Cube busts up the office of Priority Records exec Bryan Turner (Tate Ellington) because of non-compensation, and so on.

The rivalry between Ice Cube and his former band members, who call him “Benedict Arnold” on a track from their second and final album “Niggaz4Life,” makes for another entertaining back and forth, but the film peaks around the time that the Rodney King beating became a major part of the 24 hour news cycle in ’91. The narrative gets messier after that, with a mess of characters popping in and out of the mix, much like the brief guest cameos that pop up on many of hip hop albums. For example, Keith Stanfield puts in an appearance as Snoop Dogg, does a dead-on impression of the young rapper, then disappears.

There is a lot of criticism that the movie, which was scripted by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff (WORLD TRADE CENTER), sanitizes N.W.A.’s story by leaving out such incriminating events as when Dr. Dre attacked hip-hop journalist Denise “Dee” Barnes in a nightclub in ‘91, and that it glosses over the frequent charge of misogyny in their lyrics. Indeed, women do the short end of the stick in this celebratory boys club of a biopic – they are the girlz on the side of the boyz in the hood, often appearing only as groupies in hotel scene backgrounds or extras at topless pool parties.

The men dominate the proceedings so much that when Carra Patterson appears as Easy E’s girl Tomica in the final act scenes that depict the rapper on his deathbed with AIDS, I wasn’t sure how much she had been in the film before.

As for the leads, Hawkins and Mitchell nail their parts as Dre and E, and Giamatti puts in another reliable performance that's equal parts sincerity and sleaze. And, having done no research beforehand, I was floored by how much of a dead ringer for Ice Cube that Jackson Jr. is - I was like 'kudos to the casting director! They must have searched the globe to find a guy that looks and acts that much like the iconic rapper!' Then I find out that he's Ice Cube's son. Man, I'm such an idiot sometimes.

However, the rest of the playas hardly register. MC Ren and DJ Yella consulted on the film, but their onscreen doppelgangers have little to do or say, and R. Marcus Taylor as producer/promoter mogul Suge Knight, one of the film's other villains, casts an imposing shadow but little else.

Now, I was a white teen who was just starting to get into hip hop at the time that this stuff was going down. I was more a Public Enemy guy, but I remember having “Straight Outta Compton” on cassette back in the day. This successfully took me back to when I was working as a record store clerk reading about these stories in music magazines, and seeing it covered on MTV News.

Despite its self serving short-comings, this big screen bio captures the look, sound, and spirit of both N.W.A. and the era in spades. Just don’t go in looking for anything less than pure legend.

More later...

John Cusack & Paul Dano Embody Brian Wilson In LOVE & MERCY

Now playing at an indie art theater near me:

LOVE & MERCY (Dir. Bill Pohlad, 2015)

I was really skeptical of when I first heard about this project, a biopic of Brian Wilson in which he’s portrayed by Paul Dano when he’s young and all mixed up in the ‘60s, and John Cusack when he’s middle-aged and all mixed-up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

The stills and footage that were initially released showed that there was a lot of attention paid to Dano’s look via his hair and wardrobe made to make him look like prime period Wilson, but the pics of Cusack, well, they just looked like Cusack. No attempt to make him look like Wilson in his 40s with a salt-and-pepper pompadour or anything. It’s just Cusack with his jet black hair, wearing shirts he’d normally wear like he just walked on to the set and refused to take part in any hair and make-up nonsense.

It’s a lot like how Cusack appeared as Richard Nixon in Lee Daniels’ THE BUTLER a few years back. Despite a little bit of a prosthetic to elongate his nose, Cusack still just looked, and mostly acted (he made a slight attempt at the disgraced President’s accent) like himself.

It’s odd as Cusack has had a rocky career of late, walking through a bunch of sad direct to VOD releases, and not even appearing in HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2, the sequel to the last movie he made that could reasonably be called a hit, so you’d think he’d change his look a little here to play the iconic singer/songwriter/producer.

But maybe the point in producer turned first time director Pohlad’s adaptation of the life of Wilson is that he shouldn’t have to. It’s like Todd Haynes’ I’M NOT THERE, the abstract 2007 biopic of Bob Dylan in which 7 different actors played Dylan at various points of his career. The themes, thoughts, and tones from the times that enhance the non-stop music are the focus, not whether whoever looks like the actual person.

That said, the most effective scenes in LOVE & MERCY, which takes its name from a track from Wilson’s 1988 self-titled solo album, are the ones in which the floppy haired Dano as the 20somethng Brian toils away in the studio making his ‘60s pop masterpieces “Pet Sounds” and SMiLE.”

The movie, which was co-scripted by Oren Moverman, who co-wrote I’M NOT THERE not coincidentally, moves back and forth from Dano’s Wilson in full genius mode to Cusack’s burned-out Wilson who’s under the control of corrupt psychotherapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti chewing the scenery to bits).

Both versions of Brian (or “Bri” as his fellow brothers and bandmates call him) have their villains. Dano has his father Murray Wilson (Bill Camp) and Mike Love (Jake Abel) on his back about making more conventional, commercial music (in protest Brian exclaims: “We’re not surfers - we never have been - and real surfers don't dig our music!”) while Cusack has the evil, oppressive Landy thwarting his every move to have a normal life. 

And a normal love life via Elizabeth Banks in a warm, winning performance as Melinda Ledbetter, former model turned Cadillac saleswoman (they have a meet cute at her dealership), who sees pretty quickly that Giamatti’s Landy is a horrible influence on the beleaguered Beach Boy.

Melinda witnesses the creepy doctor’s methods – made creepier by Giamatti’s bug-eyed intensity - under his oppressive 24-hour a day supervision. Landy, who we see in a pivotal scene berating his patient for eating a hamburger without permission, eventually forbids the budding relationship between Melinda and Brian. Melinda then starts phoning members of Wilson’s family, and doing what she can to rescue Brian from Landy’s clutches.

This is well-acted, well executed stuff, but the real heart of the film is in the recreations of the studio sessions in the ‘60s. It’s apparent that filmmaker Pohlad, and screenwriters Moverman and Michael A. Lerner, have studied every bit of footage, noted every instance of studio chatter, and absorbed every bit of the multi-disc box sets, and bootlegs of “Pet Sounds” and Smile” material. They also earn points for depicting and paying respect to “The Wrecking Crew,” the group of top notch session musicians that took endless notes from Brian on how to arrange his “teenage symphony to God,” but not calling them by that name as it was applied much later.

Dano and Cusack both do good work in embodying the tortured artist that has heard voices in his head in 1963, but it’s Dano who nails the young Brian’s angsty ambition. And, like I said before, it helps that he actually resembles Wilson. While Cusack puts in one of his most lived-in performance in ages, I still had to remind myself that he was playing the same person as Dano.

LOVE & MERCY is a much better than average musical biopic, because it’s more concerned with capturing the psychological essence of its subject than it is with a formulaic greatest hits approach – although its soundtrack is prime period Beach Boys tracks blaring from start to finish. The casting may be a bit mismatched, but the vibrations it picks up, both good and bad, all resonate extremely deeply.

More later...