Chris Rock has two young daughters Lola and Zahra. One day, Lola asks why she doesn't have good hair. Chris goes into a funny in-depth dive into the world of black people's hair. It's a hidden world for most non-blacks and this is informative. The interview with the white chemistry professor is funny when he asks why black people put sodium hydroxide in their hair. Rock could have had more white people interviews. He follows some of the competitors in the Bronner Bros Hair Battle. His wit is great and he's able to also deal with the material seriously. This is very much right up his alley. It's fun and ultimately has a point to make.

While this is not the greatest movie ever or even the last word about (mainly) black women's hair, it's well worth seeing, and strikes a nice balance between being entertaining and informative. Chris Rock is basically learning as he goes, and he sort of functions as a surrogate for us viewers. It's definitely an Obama-era movie: whenever it starts to get critical, it backs off a little and is careful not to offend any group. His style of questioning can be a bit cheeky but he's always engaging. The film keeps focus on the creative/fashion side, rightly so, I think. If you're up for something different, interesting but certainly not heavy, I recommend it.

Chris Rock digs deep into the various elements at play in the big-money world of black hairstyling. In between interviews with the small local businesses who are unashamedly making a killing on weaves, (one blue-haired stylist with a full waiting room proudly proclaims that her work "starts at a thousand") Rock finds some unsettling truths about the origins of this product, the toxicity of the ever-popular "relaxers" women are gladly globbing onto their scalps, and the showy world of celebrity hairdressers in Atlanta. Rock's no Michael Moore, and the investigative bits are revealing but not particularly thorough; he's at his best when he's in his element, joking with patrons and poking fun at the hapless boyfriends mournfully waiting for their wallets to run out of steam in the lobby. A bit long at ninety-six minutes; it's only got enough gas for seventy or eighty, but it's decent fun while it lasts.

Apart from being raucously funny from first line to last, Rock's film is a document of worth – at least for an ignorant cracker like me. The well chosen and well-edited talking heads that make up the film debate forthrightly the merits of painful chemical hair relaxants (a vaunted tradition,) and human hair weaves (a staggeringly expensive habit,) and why such excesses are so deeply ingrained in African American culture. Is it just common sense to cover up nappy roots? Maybe such extreme measures are an outgrowth of a minority self-image crisis in a primarily Caucasian country? Or, maybe, in spite of the questionable causes of seeking out "good hair," it simply isn't worth f***ing with a woman who wants to look her best. (This is the side that Mister Ice-T takes, in his infinite, smutty wisdom…) In discussion, Rock handles his subject alternately with reverence and irreverence, and his film comes away with few concrete conclusions; though it works like Michael Moore's muckracking at its funniest, this isn't any sort of agitprop. The tone is playful and provocative, and though the topic runs a little low on steam around the hour mark, that only means that Rock has to fill the last portion of his film with the finals competition of the Bronner Brothers International Hair Show, a display every bit as absurd as the climax of ZOOLANDER, but all the more hilarious for its, you know, actual, objective reality.READ THE REST OF MY REVIEW (AND MORE) AT STEVENSPIELBLOG.COM ...-Greg