The things Calvin and George share are deeper than skin. Both had admirable, self-sacrificing fathers who helped many people but never had two spare nickels to rub together during their lives. Both have loving, supportive families and friends. Both dream of doing something great, something larger. Both are bequeathed businesses that they see as the curse that broke their fathers and kept them poor. Both lose sight of what’s important. Both are blind to the many blessings in their lives. Both learn the error of their ways.

Ice Cube may never become as beloved an actor as Jimmy Stewart, but his career becomes more interesting with each project. His performance as Calvin is the best of his career, but Barbershop doesn’t just put his acting on display. His production company, Cube Vision, provided the financing for the film, and it’s an admirable example of vision, a film that represents the values of community, family and neighborhood tradition and a hilarious diversity of opinion.

Calvin is the owner of a barber shop on the South Side of Chicago. His grandfather started the shop. His father maintained the business through decades of change and upheaval. He gave haircuts to customers with no money. He offered opportunity to young barbers who needed a chance. The shop is an anchor and oasis in the neighborhood. Calvin has run the business for two years since his father died. He has used loans and grants meant for the shop on what he would call “entrepreneurial ventures” but most people would call “get rich quick” schemes that have failed. He is sick of working so hard to just survive.

On the day Barbershop takes place, it is a cold and nasty day in winter. The slightly faded mural of his father and other characters looks down from the wall on the shop at Calvin and seems to be scolding him. The many barbers in the shop are fighting the way they always do and getting on Calvin’s very last nerve. Calvin is about to become a father, and he wants more for his child and family. He needs money to pay his taxes on the shop, and the bank is not going to lend him any more.

In this moment of weakness, Calvin makes a deal to sell the shop to a not-very-reputable local gangster-like businessman. If his oily, unpleasant manner doesn’t let you know this guy is no good, his awful purple suit should. When Calvin returns to his day, after selling the shop, he starts to see and hear things in a different light. He can’t bring himself to tell the barbers he’s made the sale, maybe because he can’t get a word in edgewise.

The best moments of Barbershop are the scenes, laughing or arguing, between the collection of characters who cut heads. There’s the know-it-all college boy Jimmy James (Sean Patrick Thomas), the new-to-the-neighborhood, sweet-tempered African immigrant with “a fondness for poetry,” as he puts it (Leonard Earle Howse), the trying-to-reform criminal (Michael Ealy), the token woman Terri (hip hop star Eve), the token white guy who affects a big black persona and is hated for it (Troy Garity) and the guy who has seen it all, Eddie.

Cedric the Entertainer plays Eddie, and it is his remarks that bring down the house nearly every time he opens his mouth. Eddie’s coif gives him the look of Frederick Douglass, and his many years in the business give him opinions on every possible subject. When the younger barbers start quarreling, about everything from music to whether or not to boil ribs to Terri’s louse of a boyfriend to reparations to what constitutes authentic “blackness” to what are the real accomplishments of black heroes, Eddieýgets in the biggest laughs – if not the last laugh. He is the conscience and the clown of the shop, delivering his most poignant lectures to the barbers about the respect they should have for what they do and respect for the significance of the barbershop in the black community. He is a preacher and a stand-up comedian and is more convincing in his preaching because he brings so much humor to his rants and delivers them with a very personal command of the language.

Barbershop isn’t a flawless picture. The plot is creaky and bald here and there, like the razor burn in the shop. You can see what is coming long before it arrives. You know Calvin is never really going to lose the shop (and you are glad for that). When the film leaves the shop, the energy sags. But Barbershop keeps coming back to the shop, and like the characters in the neighborhood you start to feel a sense of comfort and security whenever you’re in the shop. I would have loved even more scenes of the barbers at work because they do a good job of keeping the customers looking sharp.

The film’s complete faith in the good things in this tough neighborhood is so genuine and heartfelt it is easy to look past its little bits of clumsiness and rough edges. You’re laughing pretty hard through most of them. In a world that sometimes feels like everything is becoming a franchise, from movies to restaurants to stores to churches, Barbershop feels built from scratch with no plan but its own.

And if we all follow Cedric the Entertainer’s advice, Martin Luther King Day will become a much more popular and interesting holiday.