Rock has a Good Hair day

Daddy, how come I don't have good hair?"

It might be the most loaded and universal question within the African American community.

And it's the question, asked by his then-five-year-old daughter, that propels comedian Chris Rock throughout Good Hair, a hilariously funny documentary that, like all great comedies, is shot through with equal parts of pain and heartbreak.

The concept of "good hair", it turns out, is as tied up and tangled with politics, economics and freighted history as the most unruly tresses.

Rock did not have an answer for his daughter, so he embarked on a madcap tour through beauty and barber shops, the Bronner Bros Hair Show and finally India, where the most coveted source material for hair extensions is grown.

Along the way he interviews celebrities in search of that perennially vexing question: What is it about black people's hair that freaks white people out so much?

Visiting a laboratory, Rock demonstrates the corrosive properties of relaxing formulas and interviews scads of women who ruefully recall their worst flat-iron and chemical burns.

The existential pain still lingers in the blonde, blue-eyed standard of beauty that everyone internalises, but that holds particularly loaded implications for African American women.

The most heartbreaking scenes in Good Hair feature a six-year-old with her head slathered in punishing chemicals and later, a group of teenagers reflexively announcing that, even though a friend's Afro is "cute", she shouldn't expect to get a decent job looking like that.

Good Hair is such a rollicking, thoroughly entertaining ride that it's easy to take for granted just how easy Rock makes it look — the spectacle, humour and bitter irony of the supercharged and largely hidden world Good Hair reveals.