Dr. Dre

In Straight Outta Compton (2015), Corey Hawkins makes Dr. Dre’s musical concentration look serious without making it solemn. The studio exchanges with O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s Ice Cube and Jason Mitchell’s Eazy-E leave room for jokes and the pleasure of working together. We laughed because the actors make these men funny without making them foolish. Dre is one of the film’s producers, and those passages make a good case for letting musicians help tell their own story.

His record production had moved from the raw, sample-driven N.W.A. album Straight Outta Compton (1988) to the G-funk of The Chronic (1992). Work with Snoop Dogg and later Eminem made developing other performers a substantial part of his job. His studio reputation rests on repeated takes and close control of the sound. The connection between his record and film work is direct: Compton (2015) was an album inspired by the biopic.

F. Gary Gray directs the film, with Dre and Ice Cube among its producers, and its treatment of those men is where our reservations begin. Their screen selves receive patient explanations that the women rarely get. We need not guess at conversations behind the scenes to notice that the women have too little space for wishes or grievances of their own. The group’s misogyny is largely sidestepped. A less protective account would have made the men more interesting, and given a strong cast more difficult things to do.

The other limitation is less delicate: the film spends too long arguing about contracts. Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff’s screenplay keeps returning to business disputes, and Paul Giamatti’s unease as Jerry Heller cannot make every discussion necessary. Those passages are a drag, particularly beside the humour and energy of the studio scenes. See it for the cast and the force of the music; keep some scepticism for the account its producers give of themselves.