‘gangsta’ biopic is a rap from the start

Gang warfare on the streets is an everyday part of life and particularly involved in this is drug dealer Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell).

From here we’re introduced to each of the young men (thanks to helpful text on the screen) who will go on to form N.W.A.

And in this simplest form, the story of how a legendary music act came to be, Straight Outta Compton is about as down the line as you can get.

As a biopic it’s a succession of moments, many of them diverting, especially in the early stages.

Dr Dre (Corey Hawkins) is the music lover with dreams of becoming a DJ and Ice Cube, the star lyricist for the outfit, is played by his own son, O’Shea Jackson Jr. Also in there are Dj Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) and MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), but they barely get a look in.

Dre and Cube start out playing neighbourhood clubs and Dre wants to channel E’s “business” skills into starting a record label, leading to the recording of their seminal album that gives the film its title.

Given that Dre and Cube serve as producers on the film, you could perhaps say there’s some airbrushing going on and it’s hard to achieve true objectivity. It doesn’t shy away from some unsavoury aspects yet ignores others, but including everything would have just meant even more episodes to wade through, and enough is eventually enough.

There’s a feeling that there’s a compulsion to include every single thing that happened to each of them over the period.

That’s fine if you’re given the luxury of a TV series to get this across, but as a movie it eventually feels both bloated and rushed.

Yet it stays interesting for a while, as their success blossoms and they go on tour. There’s the simmering threat of violence amongst their members and rival artists, and hanging over all of this is the harassment by over-zealous and just plain racist cops, and it’s this angle from which the story derives its real power.

It’s well put together, but hardly groundbreaking in form, with events often portrayed in the broadest strokes, hitting the same beats a number of times and rarely quite as epochal as it sometimes thinks it is.

But though it certainly can go on and on, what’s of far greater import lies in its content as we head through the history lessons of the 90s.

It’s powerful and hard-hitting in its depictions of the racial tensions of the time and, just as was illuminated in Selma earlier this year, what we mustn’t shy away from is the grotesque reality that this is a country that still faces these problems on a daily basis.

Running Time: 147 mins

Director: F Gary Gray

45 Years (15, 95 mins)

Director: Andrew Haigh

4 stars

Kate and Geoff (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay) are approaching their 45th wedding anniversary when a letter arrives for Geoff from Switzerland with information about a woman with whom he had a relationship in the 1960s before he met Kate. What this information does to them unfolds over a few days in a beautifully observed drama that’s low on incident but runs high with feeling and insight as truths and lies are aired. A wonderfully economical script that gets the key information across with minimal fuss is the driving force, alongside a pair of faultless performances from Courtenay and especially Rampling, who is asked to do an awful lot of heavy lifting without dialogue. And if it doesn’t quite deliver the knockout wallop that it seems to be promising, tidy direction that doesn’t demand endless coverage of scenes to get to the heart of the emotions shows that this is still the work of an extremely skilled and confident filmmaker in Andrew Haigh.

See it if you liked: Another Year, Le Week-End, I Anna

We Are Your Friends (15, 96 mins)

Director: Max Joseph

2 stars

Four California pals (Zac Efron among them) hope to make it in the world of DJing in what looks like another shallow portrait of the hedonistic lifestyle of characters that prove difficult to care about. Efron meets up with a rich and famous DJ and tries to learn the trade as we spend a lot of time with them in clubs, taking us into the minutiae of DJing. There’s some - though not much - value in that, and by eyeing a narrow target audience this is unlikely to offer much to those on the outside. There’s only so many times you can look at someone pressing buttons on their laptop or twiddling a deck and in the end there’s as much chance of being reminded of Ross’s keyboard playing in Friends as there is of being impressed by the faintly ridiculous music.

See it if you liked: Eden, Bad Neighbours, Spring Breakers

Hitman: Agent 47 (15, 96 mins)

Director: Aleksander Bach

1 star

It’s not often a film can lose you during the opening credits, but that’s the case with this appalling actioner as a soporific voiceover fills us in on the Agent programme, a fleet of genetically modified super-assassins who were decommissioned some years ago. One such is Agent 47 (Rupert Friend), who along with another highly trained individual (Zachary Quinto), chases a woman (Hannah Ware) around Berlin while both or either or neither of them may be good or bad or who knows. Hitman: Agent 47 is based on a very popular video game and is a reboot of a 2007 effort that was itself rubbish, but which now looks like a classic next to this. 47 is envisioned as an emotionless killing machine, which may be fine for the game but doesn’t translate to the screen where interesting characters are a requirement. Punishingly dull backstory leads to garbled nonsense plot-wise, and it’s unbelievably boring when it’s people talking and no more successful when it comes to the action which, let’s face it, is why we’re here. It’s full of CGI for its cars and crunching bodies, all slo-mo and shadows which is mistaken for actual style. In the wake of John Wick this sort of thing doesn’t really cut it anymore and Hitman: Agent 47 is just remarkably poor in every possible way.

See it if you liked: Hitman, Max Payne, Lucy