Lenny (1974, Bob Fosse) (Patreon)

58/100

Second viewing, last seen probably around late March of 1991*. To some extent, this circumvents the standard biopic problem via sheer formal dexterity and aggressiveness; Fosse's regular editor, Alan Heim, doesn't seem to have much of a reputation apart from deservedly winning the Oscar for All That Jazz (his other notable films include everything from Network to The Notebook), but he does similarly superlative jagged work here, fashioning a free-associative rhythm that makes the film feel more like a cascade of sharp-edged memories than like a succession of notable events in Bruce's life. Took me a while to get past how much Hoffman sounds and acts like himself—to be fair, Bruce's fuck-you energy is quite hard to capture; while I enjoyed Luke Kirby's portrayal on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, he didn't really pull it off, either)—but Fosse has conceived and constructed the film in such a way that its performances are really secondary (though Valerie Perrine manages to be very affecting nonetheless, particularly in the framing interviews). Indeed, Lenny is so fundamentally cinematic, so predicated on cuts and angles and juxtapositions, that I can't even imagine how the stage play from which it was adapted would have worked, which is among the highest praise that I can offer. Everything that's great is hard to describe, so that I'm stuck trying to convey the impact of a frame that's empty save for some nylons hanging on a shower rod in the background, followed by Bruce suggesting to Honey that they get married and Perrine, after a brief pause, moving into frame with an eyelash curler pressed to one eye and then a hard cut on Honey's "What?" Somehow, despite coming from theater, Fosse was a born film director (though, again, Heim likely deserves a lot of credit), and this is a movie.

But it's still a biopic, and it still runs into the intractable Lenny Bruce problem (or maybe falls into the inescapable Lenny Bruce trap), which is that the final years of his life were a tediously self-righteous hectoring slog. Thankfully, Fosse doesn't spend a ton of time on Bruce boring audiences silly by reading court transcripts (mostly one long harangue shot from a distance), and it's not as if the film doesn't examine its subject's less admirable qualities—the scene that sees him pressure Honey into a threesome and then turn on her for actually enjoying sex with another woman is hard to stomach, in a good way (dramatically speaking). But there's no sense in which Lenny Bruce, First Amendment Martyr proceeds organically from what we see in the film's first hour. It's just imposed upon the story (or the deliberate lack thereof) by history. On top of which, the interplay between Bruce's personal life and his stand-up routine gets more and more cutely ironic as the former becomes more and more chaotic, until it starts coming across like some of those early Seinfeld episodes in which the opening and closing mic bits directly refer to Jerry's adventures in between. (This is perhaps where you can spot the play's skeletal remains.) I know I'm a broken record on biopics and how they should generally be loosely inspired fiction instead, but this does seem like a case in which Fosse would have been better off making something more like Punchline (but, y'know, hopefully better, if I correctly recall how lame that film is), inventing a comedian who shares many of Bruce's characteristics but doesn't need to end up turning his nightclub act into a proto-podcast about navigating the criminal justice system. Or, if that's where you do want to land, make up a dramatically coherent flight path to get there. Lenny frequently feels unconstrained, thanks to Fosse and Haim's skill, but it's never truly free. 

* This review was delayed a couple of days because I finally sat down and tried to reconstruct my initial run through the canon during the year-plus that I worked at Scott's Super Video, from November 1990 until sometime in early '92. That's possible, in a rough way, because my selection process was very systematic: I would go from section to section (comedy one night, drama the next, then action, sci-fi, musicals, westerns, etc.) alphabetically, Maltin Guide in hand, looking for movies with four-star ratings. When those were exhausted for a particular section, I'd jump back to A and search for 3.5-star ratings. So while I don't know exactly what day I watched Lenny, I do know that I watched it after watching All the President's Men and The China Syndrome and In Cold Blood and various other films that alphabetically precede Lenny and were likewise in the drama section and likewise got four Maltin stars. And also after a bunch of films toward the beginning of the alphabet in other sections. Anyway, armed with an incomplete but still pretty damn extensive list of films that I rented during that period (which I sent to a friend at the time, because I have always been a weirdo, see image below), plus Maltin's ratings, I was actually able to piece together the chronology with what I believe to be reasonable accuracy. Not that it matters, of course, but I enjoy a meaningless challenge and now I can log those on Letterboxd.

(There are some titles in there—Bert Rigby, You're a Fool; Chicago Joe and the Showgirl; The Handmaid's Tale; The Last of the Finest; Mister Frost; I think even Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer—that weren't part of my systematic Maltin rentals. Just new releases I decided to watch for whatever reason.)

((I could not believe that this list exists when I found it amongst the numerous letters I wrote to my high-school friend, who lent them back to me. Would never have imagined then how useful it would be for me over 30 years later.))