After weeks leading the box office at number one, Straight Outta Compton, which I sadly saw late and couldn’t experience this terrific movie’s surprise with everybody else, has become an out of left field late summer hit. In retrospect, this movie’s cultural explosion—142 million worldwide and counting— should’ve been obvious. N.W.A.’s legacy is alive and loved, but what made Compton soar is that their story, starting on the ghetto streets of Compton and ending in Wolf of Wallstreet style uproarious parties in massive mansions, with some stadium concerts as the rocket fuel that brought them higher and higher, is inexorably tied to race and class at a time in desperate need of stories on those subjects to be told. Compton tells a story of a famous music group but also of race and of class and of celebrity, and director F. Gary Gray tells it well in his best directed film to date. This isn’t a story isolated to the stage and behind the scenes drama of a band coming together and falling apart—a story we’ve seen various levels of in many films before, notably Sid and Nancy—but instead plunges you head first into the eternal history of why N.W.A. exploded in the first place.

Wisely, the quintet of script-based storytellers (with two screenplay credits given to Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff) realized to completely capture the story of N.W.A. as a Bio-pic, a powerful injection of indirect theme and story was necessary. Gray goes full steam ahead introducing us to the film’s main trio of Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), and Eezy-E (Jason Mitchell) through a set of mythologized self-contained story beats that almost work as individual short films telling an origin story. Eazy-E’s is the first—the gangster—introduced to us through a well-shot opening scene that’s already thick with atmosphere and tension, as he places a pistol in his slacked trousers and walks toward a dilapidated house bathed in fluorescent light. It’s a stylish and artistic opening image, showing a gross image of a ghetto home presented to us beautifully, mythologized, romanticized, but still honest and sincere of the memory of how Eazy-E might have lovingly reminisced about the night. Once he enters the house it’s the makings of a drug deal gone awry, a scene straight out of Scorsese, and a beat or two later the sound of militarized police comes charging onto their street. RUN.