Hair (1979)

Milos Forman's 1979 adaptation of the Broadway tribal love-rock musical arrives with the earnestness of a peace rally and the pacing of a revue. Claude, a draftee from Oklahoma, wanders into a New York tribe of long-haired panhandlers and spends two hours negotiating between the farm, the commune, and the debutante ball. The film wants us to feel the Vietnam era in our bones. It mostly succeeds, though the bones in question belong to 1968, and the film knows it.

The racial material is the most substantial thing on offer. Dorsey Wright's Hud carries a genuine ache, and the staging of "Colored Spade" and "I'm Black/Ain't Got No" treats race as a lived American problem instead of a slogan. The casting of Black performers in the ensemble reads as naturalistic for 1979, not as a modern mandate. Elsewhere the counterculture's looser sexual arrangements survive in muted form. Woof's inclinations are present but unremarked, which is how the era handled such things on screen.

Where the film thins out is in its politics. The stage Sheila was an outspoken feminist; the screen Sheila is a New Jersey debutante, and with her goes most of the show's gender argument. What remains is Jeannie's marriage-for-exemption proposal, played for plot. The anti-war sentiment lands hard and often, building to a peace march and a grave at Arlington, though it travels by song instead of sermon. There is no environmental content, no body-acceptance framing, no neurodivergent character, and no revision of the historical record. The tribe's anti-establishment posture targets the draft, not the bank. A period piece, then, wearing its period honestly.