Documentary examines way blacks feel about their hair

By Roger Moore

Like the titular follicles this documentary surveys, “Good Hair” is a bit all over the place.

It’s about black women trying to achieve “European” standards of beauty, about the way black men feel such “unnatural” hair keeps them at a distance, the loaded language that frames the way black people relate to their hair, about black hair salons and their role in the economy of black communities, about India’s thriving hair-weave export trade and the alarming and dangerous chemistry of hair relaxers.

All because Chris Rock, who narrates and does the interviewing here, was shocked when his little girl asked him, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?”

Rock, at ease in his comic and social commentator role, doesn’t so much challenge the dogma “If your hair’s nappy, you’re not happy” as illuminate it. The hair-care industry, black hairdressers and ordinary black women and men reinforce the notion that natural black hair is “bad hair.” And that trick of image and syntax has even working- class women spending a fortune on expensive weaves that can’t be touched, fondled or wetted, or have sodium hydroxide rubbed into children’s scalps to get them on “the creamy crack” — relaxers — pretty much from birth.

Poet Maya Angelou marvels that “a woman’s hair is her glory,” before confessing that she, too, has embraced relaxers. Actresses Nia Long and Meagan Good and singers Eve and Pepa detail what they go through to get weaves, and the sort of commitment having those commands from a man. “High maintenance” doesn’t cover it.

“Our self-esteem is wrapped up in it,” the naturally curly Tracie Thoms (“Grindhouse”) gripes.

Rock riffs with Indians going to a temple to have their heads shaved and with black women of every physical description, who want hair that they can toss “Farrah-Fawcett style.”

Rock alternates from amused to amazed, hanging with longtime hair-relaxer the Rev. Al Sharpton, visiting the vast black-owned and operated Dudley Products hair-care empire in North Carolina, watching a chemist melt a soft drink can with sodium hydroxide.

The film (directed by Jeff Stilson) goes off track when it gets caught up in a dippy Atlanta hair-styling competition that is more about putting on a flamboyant show and entertaining your fellow hairdressers than styling hair. This contest gives the movie an artificial “big game” framework that distracts from the message Rock is trying to put over — that this “Farrah” hair obsession, sexy as it can be when it’s Tyra or Beyonc tossing her weave, is a new form of slavery and self-exploitation.

Rock has long been the king of comics willing to speak black truth to black people. He seems to pull his punches here. Long, in several comically confessional moments, makes his points for him.

Scattered as it sometimes seems, “Good Hair” is a real eye-opener, both for people who may not realize just what they’re spending and what they’re doing to their scalps, and to anyone of any race still not comfortable asking, straight out, “Say, how DO you get your hair to do that?” The real head- scratcher here is the follow-up question: “Why?”

‘GOOD HAIR’

Grade: C

Director: Jeff Stilson

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes

Rating: PG-13 for some language including sex and drug references, and brief partial nudity