In “Good Hair” (Jeff Stilson, 2009) Chris Rock offers an initiation into the world of African-American women’s hairstyling. I was immediately excited by this winning combination of a much-loved comedian and a much neglected topic.

The film gets off to a less-than-promising start, from which it quickly recovers. A rather choppy opening collage of interviews with black actresses and musicians gradually coalesces into a definition: ‘good hair’ is non-African hair, hair which is soft, smooth and bouncy. Many black women are more than willing to put their health and their finances at risk for the sake of ‘good hair’. Most of the film is devoted to explaining how and why this takes place, and it makes for a largely fascinating 90 minutes. The hazardous method for straightening hair is to use chemical ‘relaxers’, which some women will apply to their daughters’ hair as early as age 2. If not used with great care, these chemicals can damage the eyes and lungs, cause skin burns, and kill the hair at its root. The safe but expensive route to ‘good hair’ is to have real human hair painstakingly sewn onto the base of one’s own hair. The film reveals that women on average salaries are just as willing as celebrities to pay anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000 for these ‘weaves’.

The film’s major weakness is its coverage of the Bronner Brothers International Hair Show, the annual trade fair of the African-American hairstyling industry. It was useful to introduce this event at the beginning of the film, as it offered striking evidence of the enormous scale of this sector. However, the film emphasised one particular segment of the fair: the hairstylist of the year competition, which was more about showmanship than skill with scissors. The film kept returning to this event, following the contestants from preparation, to performance, to prizegiving. It was already difficult to care about the competition, as all but one of the contestants came across as preening egotists: winning the prize would only confirm their high self-opinion, and it wasn’t clear what difference the prize money would make to their lives or businesses. The over-familiar reality TV approach to this part of the film only made it more tiresome to watch.

I would have liked to see the film replace the competition with a deeper investigation of the issues underlying African-American hairstyling. The film had two major political messages, both race-based. The first is that black women have become alienated from their own hair in its natural state: culture has romanticised European and Asian hair, and society seems to feel uneasy with African hair. Black women’s hairstyling decisions are thus more than a case of always wanting what you don’t have, straight-haired women longing for curls while the curly-haired wish for smooth and manageable tresses. The film’s most saddening interview is with a group of black teenage girls who believed that their natural hair would be a barrier to professional success.

While I was convinced by the argument that the dominant culture in America is against African hair, it would have been nice to revisit the 1960s and 70s, when more black people felt proud to wear Afros. The film briefly mentioned the caucasian fascination with African-American hair, making jokes about the consequences of touching people’s hair without permission. Chris Rock also does a Michael Moore-style stunt, visiting stores in LA which sell human hair, making unsuccessful requests to buy African hair, and finally offering to sell them some from a bulging plastic bag he carries with him. Is it true, though, that no white person would ever buy an African weave? What about miserable caucasian attempts at dreadlocks? I think that an investigation of the attractiveness of African hair and hairstyles would have provided an engaging, even encouraging counterpoint to the argument.

The film’s second main political point was that the African-American hairstyling market, in spite of selling products aimed solely at black people, is almost entirely white and Asian-owned. Black-owned companies account for just 4 or 5 of the hundreds of businesses profiting from this market. However, I felt that significance of gender in this situation was crying out to be addressed. Not only did the film show African-American women on average salaries spending exorbitant amounts on weaves: it also showed women in India giving their hair away for free, or working for presumably small wages to prepare the hair for export. It is the middle men (as opposed to middle women) who are making the biggest profits in this industry, while women are underpaid and overcharged.

In spite of my suggested tweaks to the film’s focus, I have to say that I was by no means disappointed by the overall vision. I hoped for an interesting documentary delivered in an entertaining way, and this review would not be complete without acknowledging the contribution of Rock’s comic talent. Although the film’s themes should, and do, provoke sadness and outrage, the tone remains upbeat and playful. Chris Rock’s talent for teasing his interviewees maintains a constant element of comedy, but this does more than create a fun experience for the audience. It creates a rapport of goodwill with his interviewees, and even provokes them to make some surprising revelations, as a question asked half-jestingly leads to a serious answer. In one memorably lively scene, Rock talks to a barbershop full of African-American men, and asks them if they remember the last time they were allowed to touch a black woman’s hair, and what this means for their relationships. The resulting debate is at times heated, at times comic, but through this mixture of outrage and laughter, the social relevance of the topic becomes clear.

This film proves that comedy has its place in documentary. While films of this genre are often intended to rouse audiences to action, the enormity of the problems presented may instead depress the audience’s spirit, and make the subjects of the documentary seem like victims. Without denying the importance of the problems, being able to laugh at them gives the impression that we are in some way invulnerable to them. It is this spirit of resilience that is often most needed in any fight to bring about change.