Every year, audiences are treated to at least four or five notable cinematic biographies, typically called “biopics” in common Hollywood parlance. It’s easy to see why. Biopics not only allow an indulgence in nostalgia – even if we’re not intimately connected with the film’s subject, we can at least fetishize their historical era – but they also give studios an excuse to flex their prestige muscles, displaying important dramas to a wide audience just in time for Oscar season. What’s more, actors love biopics, as it gives them an opportunity to stretch their craft. With biopics, everyone wins.
This year saw biopics about the first person to undergo gender reassignment surgery, the inventor of the self-wringing mop, Whitey Bulger, the man who walked a wire between the World Trade towers, two guys who hiked the Appalachian trail, identical twin criminals, a blacklisted screenwriter, a Cold War lawyer, a pair of rival writers, a team of stalwart reporters, a team of trapped miners, a sociology experimenter, James Dean, and Muhammad. And that’s not even half of them.
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While Spotlight and The End of the Tour are amongst the best films of the year, when it comes to out-and-out biography, there were two pop biopics that dealt more intimately with recent historical figures that a large number of people can openly relate to. In a world of tech obsession, we were granted access, via Danny Boyle’s pretty great film, to Steve Jobs. Also, Hollywood finally saw it fit to detail the rise and rise of one of rap’s most important bands, N.W.A, in Straight Outta Compton.
So, which of these two was better? Let’s compare and contrast.
The Case for Steve Jobs:
Universal
It’s nigh impossible to discuss Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs without comparing it to the truly awful 2013 biopic Jobs, directed by Joshua Michael Stern. The latter film looked at the tech mogul with a worshipful eye, granting him absolution from all his ill-doings and outwardly jerky behavior through the mere popularity of his forcibly mandated consumer electronics. Steve Jobs, by contrast, is mercifully low on frothing hero worship. In Steve Jobs, the title luminary is seen as, at the very best, a silver-tongued antihero who uses tech jargon, aggressive business doublespeak, and not-so-subtle bullying tactics to ensure that he is always in the right, even as he ignores close friends, important inventors, and even his own daughter.
Steve Jobs, while eventually kowtowing to a vague sense of tech grandeur to the man (which is only arguably warranted), spends a lot of its running time forcing a sense of moral ambivalence onto him. Here is a man who knows how to sell computer products to the masses, henceforth popularizing a new form of mass communication, by stepping on underlings and obfuscating blame. He’s clearly an egomaniac whose biggest talent is not inventing, or computers, or even marketing, but that most ancient of American capitalist traditions: bullshit. This is a revealing, if not necessarily revolutionary, look at a figure who is deified just as often as he is vilified.
Steve Jobs also possesses a clever narrative backflip, in that it describes only three brief events in Jobs’ life: the hour leading up to the release of the Macintosh, the hour leading up to the release of the NeXT, and the hour leading up to the release of the iMac. I appreciate that we can see Jobs through his products, rather than through a dull retread of day-to-day history. What’s more, the dialogue, by wit-meister Aaron Sorkin, crackles and moves and bubbles with intelligence. The film is, ultimately, clever and watchable.
The Case for Straight Outta Compton:
Universal
N.W.A’s 1988 album Straight Outta Compton is arguably the most important rap record in history, and the impact it has had on culture is immeasurable. It changed the way pop music is made, launching new trends that we’re still living with in a big way. It makes sense, then, that filmmakers should eventually detail its making, its impact, and the rivalries of the people who made it. 2015 gave us the release of F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton, an epic 150-minute chronological telling of the record’s making and aftermath.
This is conventional biopic-making 101, starting from the various members’ teen years in the impoverished and crime-riddled streets of Southern California, to their place as rap superstars. Indeed, Straight Outta Compton covers so much happenstance, that it almost feels incomplete, even at 2 1/2 hours. It’s bracing and astonishing to realize how quickly this record rose to fame, and how big people like Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E became.
After dozens of biopics of, say, The Beatles and their effect on rock music (read: music listed to by white suburban teens), there is an at-long-last quality to Straight Outta Compton. It argues, without a hint of condescension, that N.W.A were important, talented, and great, and that a form that once fought for legitimacy is not only legitimate, but the bedrock for musical culture.
The Winner: Steve Jobs
Universal
Although the events of Straight Outta Compton are important, and it’s exhilarating to see them dramatized, ultimately… the film feels incomplete. The filmmakers simply bit off more than they could chew, so eager were they to include every possible detail. What’s more, two of the ex-members of N.W.A acted as producers on the film, so a lot of their own crimes and wrong-doings are obfuscated in the face of what I can only assume to be producorial approval.
Steve Jobs may devolve into hero worship, but it wins out through efficiency, cleverness, and that awesome crackling dialogue. The structure is theatrical and stagey, but in a way that focuses rather than omits. Straight Outta Compton dissipates through its sprawl. Steve Jobs tightens through its hyper-lucidity. Cinematically speaking, it’s the better film.
Top Images: Universal
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. He also contributes to Legion of Leia, and Blumhouse. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
