I’m sure everyone has had a bad hair day at some point. My hair goes completely Einstein if it grows long enough. However, as Justin Simien points out here, the minor hair issues we go through pale in comparison to those faced by black women, who, though societal implications, must undergo insane transformations just to try to fit in. Bad Hair tries to personify those fears and transformations, with a little bit of the late 80s dance club music scene thrown in.
Anna (Elle Lorraine) works at Culture, an MTV like station, in 1989 as an assistant to the trail blazing producer Edna (Judith Scott). Station owner Grant Madison (James Van Der Beek), seeking to change up the network, Grant forces Edna out and replaces her with former model Zora (Vanessa Williams), to the chagrin of Anna and some of the other assistants (Lena Waithe among them). Desperate to keep her job, Anna takes Zora’s advice and gets a new hairstyle from Virgie (Laverne Cox), who introduces Anna to weaves. Empowered by this new look, Anna grows more confident in her position at Culture, maybe even to the point to challenge an old flame (Jay Pharaoh) on his bullshit; however, the hair might be adding some additional, homicidal tendencies to Anna’s confidence as well.
Simien, through Dear White People, showed how adept and immersed he is in specific black experiences, and how to make a great story out those experiences. He applies that sharp eye to the first hour of Bad Hair. Simien does a Chucky type situation with Anna’s weave, taking old folklore and integrating it into his modern story of a black woman trying to be at the forefront of creating culture in the United States. Simien gives the movie this uneasy feeling throughout the proceedings, showing how Anna’s personality and success is tied to a haircut, which sounds kinda crazy, but if you ask many black women, decades of people trying to touch their hair say otherwise. The movie also mines brilliant scares out of Anna simply trying to wrangle in her now unwieldy locks, and the pain it inflicts on her doing so. As time goes on, we see the hair and Anna have a war over Anna’s body/personality, forcing her into uneasy alliances with herself, a nice dig at the concept of compromise in art. If Bad Hair had kept things nice and subtle, Simien might have a shot at an instant horror classic on its hands.
But clearly some of those art compromises Simien comments on in the first half rear their disheveled heads in the 2nd half. I’m picturing some executive telling him to get creative with his hair killin’. In doing so, Simien forces the movie into a campy tone, jarring wildly with the fascinating story he was telling early in the movie. This means that in one scene you have Vanessa Williams and Lena Waithe winking at the audience, but poor Elle Lorraine can’t wink because her eyes are drowning in fear tears. The jokes and Final Destination like elaborate hair killin’ can be pretty funny, but at the expense of the pointed story Simien set up? Probably not worth it.
That means Justin Simien has created one of those midnight movies that will be shown at B Fests for years to come. There’s something in most of the films that have long lives at those fests, and Bad Hair has a couple of things in its favor: cultural appeal and insane killing sequences. It’s somewhere between Teeth and It Follows, but much closer to It Follows. And it will make people maybe think twice about where their hair extensions are coming from.