F. Gary Gray's 'Straight Outta Compton' opens

Why it matters

Straight Outta Compton opened August 14, 2015. F. Gary Gray directed. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Tomica Woods-Wright (Eazy-E's widow) produced. The cast included Cube's own son O'Shea Jackson Jr. as Cube, Corey Hawkins as Dre, Jason Mitchell as Eazy, Aldis Hodge as MC Ren, and Neil Brown Jr. as DJ Yella. Paul Giamatti played Jerry Heller. The film grossed $60.2 million in its opening weekend, the highest opening for any musical biopic to that point, and $200 million worldwide on a $28 million production budget. The film is notable both for what it included (the early Compton drug-money origins, the Straight Outta Compton studio sessions, the Detroit cops refusing to provide security, the FBI letter, Eazy's death) and for what it left out (Dr. Dre's documented assaults on Dee Barnes and Michel'le, both of which the film completely omitted, prompting Dre's eventual public apology to both women in 2015). The film revived major commercial interest in NWA's catalog. You can debate the film's selective memory. The cultural impact is harder to debate.