Before Good Hair, my only exposure to weaves was when a girl fight ended in hair ripped from a belligerent head and with me standing nearby wondering what just happened. Admittedly ignorant on the subject, I was surprisingly engaged by this documentary’s informative interviews and good-natured charm that entertains regardless of gender or race.
Director Jeff Stilson takes a subject as simple as hair and expands it into a frequently funny discussion about culture, fashion, and obsession while following comedian Chris Rock‘s comical quest for knowledge.
Rock has directed a couple narrative films starring himself, but this time he executive produces, hosts, and narrates a comprehensive examination of African-American style; from the roots of attraction to the frayed edges of competitive cutting. Curious after his 5-year-old’s questions about “good hair,” he travels the country to salons, barbershops, and conventions educating himself about women’s hair while a camera crew captures every quip and candid response.
The film questions the necessity and borderline addiction to straight hair as Rock lands a few observational one-liner comparisons to cocaine. Salon customers of low means admit to plunking down thousands of dollars for extensions and weaves, supporting a $9 billion industry with their food or rent money. One woman flew from Colorado to New York for a stylist appointment. Others endure the excruciating pain of relaxer, a sodium hydroxide formula capable of chewing through soda cans.
In America, most singers, actresses, and models have chemically altered or carefully attached hair. We hear from some of those celebrities, like Eve, Ice-T, Nia Long, Salt-N-Pepa, and (that’s so) Raven Symone. 
Of course, like all things black in America, the pinstriped Reverend Al Sharpton chimes in with rhetoric about minority identity and more serious topics scarcely mentioned in the generally breezy doc.
Rock even ventures to India, the largest exporter of human hair in the world where a religious shaving ceremony turns to profits for a lucrative temple. An American “weaveologist” ironically offers, “Women want to look as natural as possible.”
The film builds to an outrageous Bronnor Bros Hair Show in Atlanta, where an over-the-top styling contest is a fashion catwalk spectacle with scissors. Showmanship is taken to ridiculous levels as contestants snip away locks underwater or perform a trim upside down.
In some women’s constant proclivity to primp, hair is just a natural extension (well, sometimes) of that desire to look good. As someone who spends a half hour at Sports Clips every other month, I was fascinated by these barbershop chair confessions and the better than good Good Hair explores a world unfamiliar to most.
4 out of 5.
