If you have never had your hair dyed, permed, streaked, foiled, weaved, straightened, flushed, frizzed or flattened, then this movie will be like An Inconvenient Truth to you – shocking.  For the rest of us, it’s a hoot.  Oh, there are serious issues examined – the toxic, sodium hydroxide used in hair relaxing; the economic impact of expensive weaving on women of meager means; the cultural message to little girls who want to look like women on television.  If the movie had been made by Mike Wallace or Frontline, the congressional hearings would already be booked.  But it wasn’t.  It was made by a comedian who is himself, surrounded by black women (a wife and two daughters) and who explicitly passes on the message he learned making the movie: DO NOT TOUCH WOMEN’S HAIR.  In the case of black women, that isn’t just figurative, it is literal.

Rock co-wrote, produced and stars in the film Good Hair, that takes us from Harlem to India and back, and traces the surprising money trail.  Most of the straightening solution or “perm” that is manufactured and distributed is owned by non-black companies.  The weaving business – that is, having hair added to your own by glue, braid or clips, begins in the temples of India with a head-shaving ceremony and ends in American salons where women pay upwards of $1000-$5000 for hair that used to belong to young women who are learning humility by shaving their heads.  If that isn’t irony, I don’t know what is.

It is a documentary in its truest form.  Rock is the narrator and interviewer, and lets the people tell their own story, whether they are in high school or Hollywood.  Much of the movie is shot in salons and barbershops and the repartee is hilarious.  He interviews movie stars, Maya Angelou, wig buyers, and warns a young woman in India to run away from black women who might covet her hair.

In my opinion, the star of the film other than Rock himself is the Reverend Al Sharpton, who helps explain the African-American obsession with hair.  (While women spend the lion’s share of the $9 billion-a-year black hair business, men are in it, too – just look at Randy Moss – that ain’t his hair!).  Sharpton makes the point that while black women once processed their hair to look whiter, and that problem still exists, it has evolved into a point of pride and dignity.  And while Rock’s movie showcases the extreme pursuit of inspirational hair, he shies away from vocalizing judgment. After all, the craft of styling African-American hair is complicated, artful and beautiful.  And after all that work – don’t you DARE TOUCH IT!