First Look At The Cast Of Straight Outta Compton

Things are looking pretty solid for erstwhile N.W.A.ers Dr. Dre and Ice Cube these days. One has a colossal headphones empire, the other a successful movie career that affords him the chance to swear furiously at Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill every couple of years. Their N.W.A. biopic, Straight Outta Compton, is a cherry on the cake. Here, courtesy of Dre’s Twitter feed, is a first look at the pair, director F. Gary Gray and their on-screen doppelrappers.

The three cast members, from left to right, are Ice Cube’s son O'Shea Jackson Jr. playing his dad, and newcomers Jason Mitchell and Corey Antonio Hawkins as Easy-E and Dr. Dre respectively. Producers Cube and Dre, here flanking **Friday **man Gray, also tweeted the movie’s release date. It’ll debut Stateside on August 14, 2015 and will chart the rise of a rap collective that also boasted DJ Yella and MC Ren and tore up the rap rulebook by matching funk and soul samples with angry accounts of life in the ghetto.

Straight Outta Compton will pick up the story in mid-1980s, six years before the band disbanded and a decade before Easy-E’s death, and will chart its rise to Billboard success. While there were not enough Parental Advisory stickers in existence to protect the ears of Middle America from the kind of raw, unvarnished and really quite sweary raps, there were also party anthems like this, the seriously head-nod-able 'Express Yourself'.

Also starring Donat Sean Abiff, Brian Gilbert, James Darnell, Dawayne Jordan, Jason Mitchell, Straight Outta Compton will be with US readers next summer.