Chris Rock looks at the hair care industry and the obsessive need of black women to straighten their locks in Good Hair.

What most men don't know about women could fill a database.

Complicate the issue with race, and you've got a jaw-droppingly bizarre experience.

For males, that is. Judging by audience reaction I've seen, Good Hair, Chris Rock's documentary on the billion-dollar industry devoted to African-American haircare, seems to communicate a code that all women -- and certainly black women -- know intimately.

Good Hair is mainly about the obsessive, generation-spanning effort by black women (and some men, like Al Sharpton and James Brown) to straighten their hair against the obvious predilection of their own follicles.

The statistic he uses has black women -- who make up 12% of the U.S. female population -- comprising 80% of the total hair care products market.

The means verges on the horrifying -- the main one being "relaxant," a.k.a. sodium hydroxide, the noxiousness of which is demonstrated to Rock by a scientist who immerses a Coke can in the stuff.

It disintigrates within four hours.

The other much more expensive, but less directly harmful route, is the weave -- which further complicates the racial terrain of the movie, seeing how the human hair worn by the likes of Nia Long, Raven-Symone and Vivica A. Fox comes from Third World countries (Raven's fave is Indian hair. It's revealed that Fox favours Malaysian). Fox actually follows some hair all the way from India -- where it's shorn as part of a religious ceremony -- to a swank Beverly Hills styling house.

Though parental anger inspired the movie -- Rock's pre-school daughter came home and asked, "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" -- he and director Jeff Stilson pointedly avoid the outrage the underlying social issues could provoke.

Indeed, the closest he comes to making a heated statement comes in his denouement at the famed Bronner Brothers hair show in Atlanta, where he notes that whites and Asians dominate the black hair industry.

The rest of the time, he is there for the funny, and snags "teachable moments" when they present themselves in the middle of his stunts -- as when he tries to sell bags of "black hair" (one Asian store owner point-blank refuses to buy it because he says it could be "unhealthy" and agrees with Rock's suggestion that it could contain Sickle-Cell).

The Bronner Brothers' circus-like convention, in fact, is the movie's tentpole. The event culminates in a bizarre Battle Royale of superstar stylists that would make a great reality-TV show (among the contestants, a young white stylist who calls himself "the Rosa Parks" of black hair, and whose preparation for the event consists entirely of getting Botox injections).

An interesting angle also presents itself with Ice-T's testimony of hair-care in the hip-hop world (apparently, when he was a teen, it was a gangsta thing to have the biggest hair-rollers).

Pepa of Salt-N-Pepa talks about a "relaxant" that burned off half her hair, resulting in an assymetrical look she passed off as deliberate.

As entertaining and illuminating as it all is, it's surprising how little thought is offered to what it all means -- especially considering the participation of scholars and writers like Maya Angelou and Nelson George.

In the end, all we're sure of is that vanity makes people do idiotic things.

For deeper thoughts, one must look elsewhere.
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