Good Hair

The film was spurred by Rock’s dilemma over how to care for his two young daughters’ little afro puffs. Would he keep them natural? Would he have them relaxed? “Good Hair’’ is the antic, free-ranging culmination of his crisis.

Rock tours the country’s barber shops and beauty parlors, interviewing people about why they do what they do to their hair and the extremes they take to maintain it. He drops in on Atlanta’s annual Bronner Bros. International Hair Show and devotes what becomes a digressive but entertaining sideshow to the convention’s farcical hair battle, which is part talent show, part circus, total hot mess. He considers the economic politics (the film explains that Asians have a lock on most of the black hair business) and talks to four teenage girls, three of whom, depressingly enough, can’t conceive of wearing a business suit and natural hair. (The very term “hair relaxer,’’ which is the lye that straightens kinky hair, has always been a joke. It relaxes white people, says the comedian Paul Mooney.)

Rock spends a scene with a “chemical genius’’ who demonstrates what sodium hydroxide - relaxer’s chemical name - does to a soda can (disintegrate it) but who has no idea that for decades black people have been putting this stuff on their scalps. (In parlor parlance, relaxers are “creamy crack.’’) He visits the Reverend Al Sharpton who’s been straightening his hair since the Reagan administration and who finds his usual rousing ways to lament destructive black behavior, even as he seems to contradict himself. And, most crucially, he talks to more than a dozen black entertainers who speak at length (sorry) about their own struggles. Some of them even discuss their own weaves, which takes a lot more guts than Andy Pettitte or Alex Rodriguez telling us they used steroids.