Straight Outta Compton didn’t exactly disappear after its huge run in 2015. More than 10 years later, F. Gary Gray’s movie keeps finding new ways to stick around, making this a good time to revisit how Dr. Dre guided Corey Hawkins while Hawkins was preparing to play him.
Now that it’s streaming on Netflix, another group of viewers can discover the N.W.A. story while people who saw it the first time have a pretty good excuse to go back. And this isn’t simply nostalgia doing all the work. The movie was a major box office success when it opened, earned strong reviews and still carries an 89% Tomatometer score today.
That’s pretty good staying power for a music biopic.
A lot of it comes down to the performances. O’Shea Jackson Jr. had the unusual job of playing his own father, Ice Cube, while Jason Mitchell, Aldis Hodge and Neil Brown Jr. stepped into the worlds of Eazy-E, MC Ren and DJ Yella.
Then there was Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre.
Dr. Dre gave Corey Hawkins some unexpected advice
Playing somebody as recognizable as Dre could easily become an imitation contest. Get the voice right. Copy the walk. Study every mannerism. Try to make the audience forget they’re watching an actor.
Hawkins was worried about it too. The difference was that he had the real Dr. Dre around to help.
Dre became a mentor during the making of Straight Outta Compton, and Hawkins was able to ask questions, spend time around the music and get a much better understanding of the man he was playing.
What Dre told him may have been even more helpful than any lesson in how to imitate him.
Click on the video below to hear Corey Hawkins explain the advice Dr. Dre gave him about playing the role.
Dre wasn’t asking Hawkins to become a perfect copy. He wanted him to understand what N.W.A. represented and put that first. That’s a very different assignment. Instead of spending the entire movie trying to make viewers say, “Wow, he sounds exactly like Dre,” Hawkins could concentrate on making the character feel like a person. It worked.
A movie with real staying power
Gray had a lot of ground to cover. Straight Outta Compton needed to show the group’s rise, the music, the friendships, the business fights and eventually the fractures that pulled N.W.A. apart.
It also had to capture why the group mattered. That’s where the movie still has an edge more than a decade later. The music obviously brings people back to a specific era, but the performances keep the story from feeling like a collection of famous songs connected by reenactments. Hawkins is a big part of that.
He doesn’t spend the movie begging you to notice how much he looks or sounds like Dr. Dre. He gives the character enough confidence, ambition and uncertainty to make the performance stand on its own. And having Dre himself tell Hawkins not to worry about imitation probably helped make that possible.
More than 10 years later, Netflix is putting Straight Outta Compton in front of another audience. Some viewers will come for N.W.A. Others may simply want to revisit one of the better music biopics of the last decade. Either way, Hawkins’ performance is still worth another look.
Straight Outta Compton is available on DVD, Blu-ray, 4K and digital platforms and is currently streaming on Netflix.
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