To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

"Mansome" is Morgan Spurlock’s oddly titled but resonant new documentary about the hairy ins and outs of male grooming.

The best thing about the movie is that it keeps drawing conclusions in opposite directions. It celebrates, for example, the primal peacockery of mustaches and beards, yet it also has a good time chortling at all the ways they can be vain and even inane.

Spurlock devotes one section of the movie to the confessional tale of his own signature mustache, only to shave it off -- big mistake.

He also takes delight in tweaking the metrosexual lifestyle: the gels, shaved chests and eyebrow threadings. This male narcissism is probably worthy of a little ridicule, though Spurlock’s mockery is never cruel. He’s really asking whether the newly obsessive relationship between men and how they look is a neurosis or, in fact, a noble update of an impulse as old as the cave days.

"Mansome" also includes a running meditation on manhood by Jason Bateman and Will Arnett; a look at the intricacies of fake-hair systems and funny and incisive talking-head commentary from the likes of Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis and Judd Apatow, plus the usual cheeky Spurlockian graphics.

The movie isn't trying to be a major expose of the hair-gel industrial complex. Yet in its funny, anecdotal way, "Mansome" gets at the high silliness and the essentialness of what men will do to look good.