Ah, the biopic. Too possessed by the narrative spirit to remain a documentary, and yet too beholden to historical fact to become a fully fictitious film. How you frustrate me so.

Going into the theater, I knew little about NWA. They were a gangster rap group and they made “F*ck tha Police” and their members included Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. Beyond that I was more or less clueless. Fortunately, Straight Outta Compton is a rather extensive biopic, covering the origins of the band to the death of member Eazy-E by AIDS. I may be unable to attest to the wisdom of any choices made in the process of crafting its screenplay from history, but the final product seems satisfactory.

The direction of F. Gary Gray largely succeeds in making the goings-on of the 1980s and 1990s feel very, very relevant to the present day. Instead of dating itself like many a historically set film more interested in contrasting the past with present, Straight Outta Compton wants to assert how little has changed. There is no reassurance that police have stopped abusing their power here.  The performance of “F*ck tha Police” is foreshadowed with managerial mutterings about how the song will attract trouble, only to be rebutted with reminders of how the reaction proves the song’s importance. The audience knows just what it’s about to get at the sound of “Yo Dre, I got something to say”, but it is still cathartic and as fresh as it was to the contemporary audience.

It is this social awareness that elevates this film above the standard biopic. Sure, it probably plays too close to the prototypical band movie plot for my taste (I don’t care if that’s actually how it happened; it is still the job of the writers to decide what exactly goes in the film. With enough finagling and less ambition, a tighter and smaller story can be told within a large one.), yet the content of that plot outshines any problems I have with its structure.