‘No shortage of comforts’: why Head of State is my feelgood movie

I can’t quit Chris Rock. He’s been a staple of my life since I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, when I was still far too young to know what Blaxploitation was and why its tropes were making me laugh so hard. Rock was my “high school SNL” representative, the misfit who brought an unapologetically Black tone to the show with characters like Nat X. He became my Goat standup comedian during an epic 90s run that yielded Bigger & Blacker and Bring the Pain, most of which I can still recite by heart.

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And yet: I’m not so delusional to think Rock can really act. Apart from his work in 2 Days in New York, where he actually relaxes for his director-costar Julie Delpy, Rock on film is stilted, uncomfortable – never more or less than his genuine self. But as it happens there’s at least one film where the painful awkwardness serves him well.

It’s Head of State, his Tyler Perry joint – by which I mean he hogs writer, producer, director and star credits. In it he plays Mays Gilliam, a small-time DC city politician who defies political convention on the way to becoming America’s first Black president. The film came out in 2003, well before anyone outside of the state of Illinois had heard of Barack Obama. It tanked at the box office. Roger Ebert was a notable critic who didn’t outright despise the film, calling it “an imperfect movie, but not a boring one and not lacking in intelligence”. It’s only since the 2008 presidential election that the film has garnered begrudging respect for its gimlet-eyed prescience.

Mays is a bleeding heart who prioritizes his constituents over his own humdrum life to the detriment of his mounting bills and his obsessive fiancee, played to outrageous effect by Robin Givens. But after saving an old woman and her cat from a house explosion in a Cory Booker-like act of heroism, Mays lands on the radar of the party operatives (not the Democrats but obviously the Democrats); they scheme to fill their 2004 ticket after their chosen president and vice-presidential picks crashed and burned in colliding flights.

Resigned to defeat against the incumbent vice-president, whose claim to fame is being “Sharon Stone’s cousin”, the not-Dems opt for a damage-limitation strategy that “sets the party up” for 2008. Initially, Mays is a perfect patsy, naively taking on the heaps of campaign advice. It takes time and some pushing from a love interest, Lisa (the noughties pinup Tamala Jones), for Mays to break away and run his own race. “If you work two jobs just to have enough money to be broke … lemme hear you say, ‘That ain’t right,’” he intones, sounding very much like his standup.

For audiences of a certain generation (ahem), there will be no shortage of comforts in this turn-of-the-century time capsule. The dearly departed rapper Nate Dogg performs the title song. What’s more, that hook and Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s Bonnie & Clyde play over and over, enough to make you think Rock blew his entire music budget just on those two tracks. But then at a Democratic fundraiser, Mays’s big rollout, Rock reaches into his old DJ bag and unwinds a setlist that includes Snoop Dogg’s Smoke Weed Everyday, NORE’s Nothin’ and Nelly’s Hot in Herre – sweet anthem of my college years.

The cast is a who’s who of Rock fans and pals. Lynn Whitfield, just a few years removed from starring in Eve’s Bayou, plays Mays’s campaign adviser – and sinks her teeth in fairly deep. Keith David and his rich baritone walk on to one scene as Mays’s city politics rabbi. The gone-too-soon standup Patrice O’Neal turns up in another to take the piss out of Mays at the gas pump before we cut to Tracy Morgan popping up inside the gas station to hustle “fresh” meat. But the performance that reels back the years is the late, great Bernie Mac as Mays’s older brother Mitch, a bail bondsman who Mays eventually taps as his vice-president – and his entrance slaps harder than, well, you know who.

I’ve come back to this film so many times after the election for laughs, only to wind up seeing the whole picture as a clearer allegory for Kamala Harris’s defeat than Obama’s victory. Like Harris, Mays was a party sacrifice, offered up to make a certain loss look less bad on the cards, thrown into the fray at the 11th hour, plugged into a humming campaign apparatus, and touted as a history maker. It really makes you think about how close comedy is to horror.

The Harris connection makes more sense when you realize Head of State was inspired by the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, selecting Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate as a last-ditch effort to take the sting out of a certain defeat to Ronald Reagan. The only reason Mays wins in the end is because he doesn’t pretend to be anything other than himself – and Rock deserves credit for getting that essential truth right. It’s comforting to imagine the 2024 election turning out differently with slightly better acting.

• Head of State is available to stream in the US on Freevee, Tubi, Paramount+ and MGM+ and in the UK on Paramount+