The title of the Netflix mini-series “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker” indicates that the facts of the life of Sarah Walker, a pioneering African-American businesswoman, will not be strictly adhered to. Then there’s the other meaning: that we are to be inspired by Walker’s story. And inspiration is what the show is peddling, the way Walker sold shampoos and pomades.

It does its job with some of the shrewdness and panache Walker demonstrated in building her hair-care empire. And it employs a fine cast in telling her amazing story, beginning with Octavia Spencer as Walker, the girl born (as Sarah Breedlove) to former slaves just after emancipation and who became the richest self-made American woman of her time. What it doesn’t do, across four episodes and 190 minutes (available Friday), is give a very strong idea of who Walker was or how she accomplished what she did.

“Self Made” sticks to Walker’s adult life, beginning in St. Louis in 1908, where the stress of working as a washerwoman and living with an angry drunk who hits her and calls her a mangy dog makes her hair start to fall out. When the gorgeous Addie Munroe (Carmen Ejogo) comes to Walker’s door selling her line of hair products, Walker sees a way out and goes to work for Munroe. Soon she’s replicating Munroe’s formula and starting her own company, which will eventually be called the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Co. after her third husband (played by Blair Underwood).

The cultural and symbolic weight of black women’s hair is touched on, but not dwelt on, in “Self Made.” (A dizzying array of hair and hairdos are on display, overseen by the hair director, Etheline Joseph.) What the writers Nicole Jefferson Asher and Elle Johnson (working from a biography by Walker’s great-great-granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles) and the directors Kasi Lemmons and DeMane Davis have gone for is good old-fashioned entertainment, with a few tears when Walker’s fortunes turn down and a few cheers when her uncommon determination carries the day.