A young black man is crossing the street in his own neighborhood when he's suddenly stopped, questioned, and detained by the police. When his parents come out of the house to protest, an officer threatens to "ruin their life. Or Baltimore. Or McKinney.
But no, it's Straight Outta Compton , the music biopic on the seminal rap group N. A that has seen wild success in the week since it premiered. But as great as the film is on its own, the events in Ferguson and elsewhere made Straight Outta Compton more than just another rap film; they catapulted the film into the national conversation of what it means to be black today.
I lucked out with an early screening at my old stomping grounds, the University of Southern California, located on the north end of South Central. City lawmakers will prefer you use the rebranded "South L. The event was open to the public, so the audience was a solid mix of doe-eyed year-olds fresh off of wrapping summer school and older folks who knew no other streets than the ones portrayed in the film. But within the first five minutes of the film's stunning opener, we were all in it together, whooping as Eazy-E narrowly escapes a militarized LAPD that doesn't hesitate from using a battering ram-wielding tank to crush through the home of a small-time drug dealer.
It's a viewing experience echoed by fellow Bustle editor Sam Rullo, who caught a press showing in New York. She tells me that black or white, young or old, people in the audience were enraptured by the film from the get-go. So, where were they? In the s, Los Angeles was suffering from a major crack and crime epidemic, with the drug most prevalent in South Central.
When N. A came out onto the scene in , aggressive police tactics were at an all-time high under the leadership of Police Chief Daryl Gates. He was the kind of police head who fully believed in the War on Drugs and would go on to tell a Senate hearing that casual drug users "ought to be taken out and shot. The film spends a great amount of time framing the rap group's journey with life-defining current events such as the beating of Rodney King. If you think about it, that infamous footage, taped by bystander George Holliday, was really the first time a police brutality video went viral β in an age before the Internet.
