This bio-pic, about the rise, breakup, and legacy of the Los Angeles hip-hop group N.W.A., gets beyond the surface of fame to reveal the machinations that brought the ensemble together in the nineteen-eighties, and soon drove it apart. The movie also highlights, with justified outrage, the abuses inflicted by the police against black people—and, in particular, on N.W.A.'s members—that gave rise to the famous song "Fuck tha Police." The director, F. Gary Gray, emphasizes the hit's importance by filming a performance of it in Detroit as a bravura showpiece. The cast—headed by Corey Hawkins, as the musical mastermind Dr. Dre; O'Shea Jackson, Jr., as the ingenious lyricist Ice Cube (who is also Jackson's real-life father); and Jason Mitchell, as Eazy-E, the entrepreneurial drug dealer who financed the group's record label and starred on its first hit—maintains an energized, conversational rapidity. But the personal lives of the musicians are mere backdrop. The core of the story is business, the object is power, and the quirks of desire and twists of the unconscious are given no place in the struggle—which the movie sharply carries ahead to the present day.
— Richard Brody