So you walk into a different theater to catch F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton—a sometimes buoyant, sometimes soggy fictional account of the fortunes of the gangsta-rap group NWA—and what do you see? White cops shoving young black men over the hoods of cars, jerking arms behind black torsos, rubbing black faces onto cement. Are relations getting worse, or staying at the same damned level? Given the temporal continuity of the two films—Nelson’s ends for all practical purposes in the mid-1970s, while Gray’s effectively takes up the story 10 years later—the least you can say is that history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as show business.
Which is not to deny the canny fashion sense that the Panthers bring to American political life in Nelson’s film, or the outrage that comes booming from NWA in Straight Outta Compton. Gray revels in the righteous indignation of Ice Cube, NWA’s best-known lyricist (and one of the movie’s producers), especially when the character rebuffs the ignorance of white scolds. NWA is neither exploiting gang violence nor glorifying it, Ice Cube insists again and again (Straight Outta Compton is nothing if not repetitive); the group is reflecting the reality outside its front door. As for the Panthers’ style, “That look…became a hit,” Kathleen Cleaver proudly recalls in Nelson’s documentary, smiling at the memory of how young black people across America, whether in or out of the party, suddenly had to have a natural, a beret, and a black leather jacket.