From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also do this show at KCRW.com.

As a stand-up, Chris Vock is known for his bold, direct, honest style, and he's brought that style to films he's been involved with personally, from his directorial debut to I Think I Love My Wife, to his newest, the documentary Good Hair, Chris, first of all, thanks for coming back. Oh, thanks for having me, Elvis. Before we get started, I have to ask you about the title, which basically informs what the movie is. You know, you want a title that causes a reaction. And, you know, with black people of a certain age, the title, good hair, just makes them kind of jump. For black people, a certain age, is a judgment. It gets back to that thing about, you know, skin color and hair. I mean, how close you are to being a white person. How close you are to being a white person? Not at all. I remember I even said it to Spike, and he even got like a little... The guy who made school days kind of bristles about it? He didn't say anything, but he just definitely looked at me like, what the... I'm trying to get him to direct it for a couple of times. What happened? He's got his own docs. Spikes does his own stuff. If you're going to hire Spike, you've got to pay him a ton of money. Or else he's going to do his own stuff. God bless him. But, yeah, me and Jeff Stillson, he did what we had to do. It's in a good place.

So what's the movie about you do?

What's the movie about? The movie is about African-American women and their hair.

And at the same time, it's also about a hair show called the Brana Brothers Hair Show that takes place in Atlanta every year.

And you can describe that hair shows because people hear hair show and they just think.

Hair show, well, okay, it is what you think.

It is hairdressers competing for who cuts the best hair.

But while they're doing this, just to add a level of difficulty to it, they have dancers

and acrobats and

like we saw fire eaters this year.

And somebody's coming here underwater.

And while all of these things are going on, it is choreographed to music.

It's so you think you can dance, the African American circus, and a hair show., people... Yeah. You also, the thing that you can't quite get in there is the way that room smells, because it smells like... It smells like chemicals and hair, and it's just a subculture within, you know, the black experience. A lot of black people don't even know about. Is that true? Because, I mean, everybody I know knows about it.

Well, if you're from Atlanta or if you're in the South, of course you know about the Barna Brothers show, but, you know, other parts of the country, they don't know about it. I don't know. It was like going to the World Cup or something. It's like going like, like you're an American and you go to this sporting event.

They're like, well, everybody's excited for this soccer.

Meanwhile, it's the biggest sport in the world. Like, you're the outsider. You're the idiot. You know what I mean? It's like that because it's such a big convention. So I call it a subculture, but it's the biggest convention in Atlanta, which is one of the biggest convention towns in America.

So it's the culture.

Because I remember when you first told me about it a few years ago, I mean, this look you had in your eyes, you said you want to get that show, right?

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