Beautiful & Moving Story

Rating: 10/10 (26 September 2015)

I saw this yesterday and I am so glad I did. The one star reviews of this movie are honestly making me very angry. It seems that people have very narrow views of the world and are upset they were exposed to a slice of peoples' lives that don't align with what they think is right. People comparing it to a porn have obviously never seen any actual pornography. This movie is poignant and moving. Yes, there are scenes with women wearing little or no clothing. People have sex. NWA blew up and surrounded themselves with beautiful women, as many celebrities do, but these are the same people who don't say a word when reviewing Wolf of Wall Street, James Bond movies, etc.
The top review right now that is showing on the MAIN PAGE for this film on IMDb says "Were black men so aggressive and shameless during the 1980's?" Are you kidding me?! If you go to see this movie and that is what you come out with, then you have some prejudices that are deeply embedded in your personality and a movie, unfortunately, can't change that.
First things first - the casting was spectacular. O'Shea Jackson Jr. and his dad could be twins, I swear. The entire cast actually look very similar to their real life counterparts. The actors and actresses in this movie were incredible and obviously felt a deep connection to the roles they played. The talent in these men, especially those playing Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy E, is off the charts. I hope to see much more of all these actors. These men lived hard lives and were born in a rough part of the world. They struggled and suffered a lot of hardship. They worked hard to get to where they did. This film doesn't gloss over any of the less pretty aspects of their lives in Compton, nor the fact that people continued to try to silence them and refused to see past their skin color even when they started to become well known. I love seeing the camaraderie between these young men - they look out for each other when no one else will. I cried twice during this movie - if there were people who weren't touched by this movie, they must have hearts of steel.
Are they angry? Of course they're angry. Look how they got treated by police, by people in general! Look how black people today STILL get treated like that! This movie is incredibly relevant to a lot of the issues going on in our society now. Anyone that thinks this movie is glorifying the thug life obviously missed the entire point of the movie and apparently turned their ears off during the scene where they LITERALLY discuss this exact sentiment. This movie seems to have offended those who live in a bubble separate from the real world where bad things happen to people and where people sometimes don't behave in ways that you think are "upstanding." News flash, it's a movie about NWA. If you didn't think there would be swearing, sex, and alcohol and drug use, you didn't know anything about the group or the time period or the places it was set in and you seemingly know nothing of the world in general. Sometimes people don't talk and act and experience things in the same way as you, and that doesn't make them inferior, it doesn't make them thugs, and it doesn't make their voices any less valid.
In summation, this movie is beautiful. It's real. It's raw. It's not whitewashed and toned down so as not to offend racist people's views of what black people should act like and what roles they should be relegated to. That's what NWA was all about anyway, not putting up with other people's crap and not allowing people to put them in a box and tell them what they can and can't say/do. I love NWA's music. My sixty year old white parents loved this movie. It's actually long enough to flesh out a complete story from beginning to end without racing through things like a lot of movies seem to do nowadays. The acting is brilliant and the camera doesn't pan away when things get real. I think everyone should give this movie a chance. I'm so glad I caught it while it was still on the big screen. It's a brilliant story about the hardships and the triumphs of a group of men who overcame a lot and fought hard to be successful. I will absolutely be buying this movie on DVD when it comes out.