Starring Samuel Lange Zambrano. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Venezuela’s socialist revolution doesn’t appear to have lifted the lives of the people we meet in Bad Hair, the third and most accessible film from writer-director Mariana Rondón. Our principal navigator of Caracas at its worst is nine-year-old Junior (the memorably soulful Samuel Lange Zambrano), who lives in a crumbling tenement with his beautiful, if glumly widowed, mother, Marta (Samantha Castillo), and a baby brother who looks nothing like his late father.

Set in the summer when Hugo Chávez was dying of cancer, the film depicts a fetid world riven by frenzied cult worship, a free-failing economy, and media saturated with beauty pageants and news of grotesque violence. Indeed, Junior and his only friend (chubby María Emilia Sulbarán) pass the days before school starts by fantasizing about their glamorous futures and guessing the problems of their caged-in neighbours. (It’s Rear Window, if Jimmy Stewart were a child living in squalor.)

Talk of rape and murder, underscored by occasional gunshots, peppers the children’s everyday chatter. So that’s one reason Marta starts worrying when she finally notices that the unusually handsome Junior spends an inordinate amount of time before the mirror. Although he evidences no particular talent, he dreams of being a famous singer, but figures his bushy Afro (pace Chris Rock’s Good Hair doc) will get in the way. Offended by Marta’s coldness, his black grandmother (Nelly Ramos) wants to straighten the hair but not the boy, hoping his lack of machismo may, in fact, save him from getting caught up in the gang violence that took his father.

After being laid off from her latest job, the bad-tempered Marta takes ill-considered advice about heterosexual role-modelling from an otherwise kindly doctor; she does this by having sex in front of the kid with her old boss—presumably thinking she’ll get rehired while teaching her son what life is all about.

This is just one of several instances where the filmmaker’s need to convey social truths squashes the humanity of her characters. The actors are all first-timers on-screen, and are quite good, although subtler hands across the board might have shaped the tale with more ambiguity and humour. The ending, with Junior shoehorned into a life that will never fully welcome him, is deeply affecting.