Good Hair? Where?

One of the undying frustrations of this job involves hoping an audience will see a film I like only to discover that, contrary to the popular tagline, it's not playing near a theater anywhere near them. Such is the case with "Good Hair," the smart and very entertaining documentary in which Chris Rock pulls the curtain back on black hair-care culture. It opened in Boston last Friday and is virtually nowhere to be seen. As of today, it's playing only in Revere and Randolph, which is wonderful, but not at a single theater in Boston or Cambridge (it did spend a week at the lackluster Fresh Pond Cinema).

I'm not arguing that the movie would set the box office on fire (it's holding its own around the country), but it doesn't even appear to be given a chance to do so here. A lot of the audience for it - black folks and their many curious friends - lives in town and has real interest in seeing "Good Hair," at least judging from the confused emails in my inbox asking when it's opening. Should we cry documentarism? Until today, "Capitalism: A Love Story" still occupied a screen at the AMC Boston Common, and "This Is It," more of documentary than I, at least, was prepared for, occupies several, not to mention a few at the Regal Fenway.

I live in Boston. I don't drive. If I wanted to see "Good Hair," I'd have to borrow a car or beg someone to take me, which in several cases would involve soothing the culture shock of my designated driver. (But that's partly what the movie wants.) Public transportation turns out to be a less than realistic option. I think I broke the usually reliable MBTA Trip Planner, trying to find the optimal route from my house to Revere. "The following error occured with your choices," it told me. "Unable to return an itinerary. There is no service available at the date, time and/or location you requested or the system is being updated." Trip Planner's suggeted route to Randolph hilariously produced a two-hour journey (the movie is only 98 minutes!) that culminates with a 33-minute walk to the theater.

As it happens, Howard Cohen and Eric d'Arbeloff, the two men who run Roadside Attractions, the distributor of "Good Hair," are from the Boston area. And when I called, Cohen told me, sympathetically, that he tried to get the movie downtown but that AMC, which runs the 18-screen megaplex on the Boston Common, didn't have room. He says he's willing to take the chain at its word (which didn't stop my eyebrow from going up). But, Cohen says, the real crime here isn't so much that one exhibitor didn't play Rock's movie. It's that there aren't enough theaters for Rock's movie to play, a problem Ty Burr addressed in a story yesterday about the new Stuart Street artplex in the theater district. And Cohen is right. There's an exhibition crisis. And it tells several stories about Boston.

It's the one major city in America where "Good Hair" isn't playing near a black neighborhood - or at least a theater heavily frequented by black moviegoers. Of course, the backhanded beauty of this situation is that we all wind up watching movies at the Common by default, mixing, even by default, than we would at the MFA, ICA, or Fenway Park. Boston isn't Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles. According the census bureau, it's about 25% black, but the truth is that Boston is a town defined, in part, by its surrounding suburbs, where there are a lot more theaters and smaller black communities. In the rest of the state, blacks account for about five percent of the population.

For what it's worth, this business with the Chris Rock movie is an exception. You can always find a Tyler Perry movie at the Common. And when "Precious" opens next month, it's likely to have long, healthy life somewhere in Boston. But "Good Hair" is also the exception that proves a rule. There's also a possibility that it could show up at the Landmark theater in Kendall Square in a week or two.