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Some of the hang-ups our parents projected onto us growing up can be easily shed. Others can permanently alter how we see ourselves. For Violet (Sanaa Lathan), the lead of Haifaa al-Mansour’s sometimes touching but often flawed Nappily Ever After (2018), the most obvious example of the latter is the effect her mother, Paulette (Lynn Whitfield), has had on her relationship with her hair. Growing up, Paulette was obsessive about Violet keeping it smooth and straight. She seems to consider it the best outward expression of one’s moral goodness; she also, unconsciously, classes it among the surest bets to most efficiently assimilate into the white society by which she longs to be accepted. A moment still sticking out to the full-grown Violet most as a good distillation of that damaging infatuation was one time in her childhood when she impulsively jumped in a pool on a hot summer day. The act was treated by her mother like a refraction tantamount to, say, stealing a candy bar or getting caught cheating on a test. Letting anyone in the community see her natural hair was worthy of punishment, unacceptable to ever be outward about.  

Violet has never been able to let go of that fixation. She eyes suspiciously gray clouds threatening to quash sunny days like they were firearms about to be unloaded. Steam belching from a cracked-open dishwasher is like poisonous gas. This paranoia has turned her into a near-freak of self-presentation. She’s never able to really let loose and have fun, remain unbothered about what kind of effect that looseness and that sense of fun could have on her looks by the end of a night.

Violet had never really noticed how much her mom’s preoccupation has affected her until it’s pointed out by her boyfriend, Clint (Ricky Whittle), one night. Violet expects him to propose at her birthday dinner; instead she gets a pet chihuahua and, after learning about that desired engagement, a confession that he has reservations about marriage. Don’t get him wrong: he loves her. But Violet’s inability to ever both literally and metaphorically let her hair down makes him feel perpetually at a distance — like, in words that soon will haunt her, they’ve been on a first date for the last couple years they’ve been together.

The kernel of truth in that harsh sentiment sends Violet into a spiral that, at its low point, has her drunkenly shaving in her head in a scene that could be turned corny by the notionally empowering soundtrack if not for Lathan’s nuanced work in it. With every snipe of the clipper, she white-knuckles the chaotic mixture of excitement, deep fear, and bewilderment Violet feels while committing what is both a sort of ultimate sin and perhaps the most effective first step in relaxing the grip her mother has had for so long.

Newly unmoored from Clint, whom she breaks up with, Violet is first more self-conscious than ever, then, after some words of encouragement from a cancer support group meeting she inadvertently walks into, freer in her body than ever. She’s concerned with how she feels than looks for the first time in her life. With that comes a new outlook on her love life. Maybe she would be better off with someone like Will (Lyriq Bent), a hairdresser good at convincing her to let her guard down, than someone like Clint, whom she’s mostly ever worried about pleasing. (Both the characters and the actors playing them, though, are bland to the point that you’d rather she be with neither.) 

She also reevaluates her career: can she ever thrive at her boys’-club advertising firm? Of course she can’t, although the movie’s insistence that Violet’s liberation be only fully complete, somehow more meaningful, if with it comes capitalist success — she near the end of the film comes up with a haircare product for women like the one she used to be — plays into a vexing trope. The script, by Adam Brooks, is vexing in other ways: its boxing-in of Paulette as a cocked-eyebrow villain and not more complicatedly a toxic victim of circumstance; its mostly unchallenged conclusion that all Black women who either straighten their hair of wear weaves fundamentally hate themselves. That Brooks is a white man, behind the scripts for romantic comedies like French Kiss (1995), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), and Definitely Maybe (2008), is revealing. 

I still liked Nappily Ever After, caveats notwithstanding, principally as a story about a woman reconnecting with herself after years trying to live up an unrealistic image of who she ought to be. And I loved Lathan’s performance in it, which finds the emotional truth in a character whose path toward self-acceptance might feel facile or overly convenient with a lesser actress in the part. Lathan’s work takes the movie to an emotional level I’m not sure it otherwise would have gotten to. Without her, the full-circle finale might seem like an emotionally manipulative advertisement for the products Violet is eventually trying to shill. But with Lathan, there’s a chance the movie at that moment could inspire a tear or two.