Dustin Hoffman is troubled comedian Lenny Bruce in Bob Fosse’s outstanding autobiography, LENNY. Courtesy of MGM.About three things I know about Lenny Bruce from watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: he was a very dirty comic, he tragically died of a morphine overdose, and… he was a VERY dirty comic. That’s it! (And he was Jewish, of course. I also knew that.) Bruce’s legacy is wild, volatile, and utterly tragic. This was a comedian way ahead of his time, perhaps so far ahead of his time that his misplacement in society was the cause of his destruction.
Let’s pause for a moment and think about comedians in the 21st century. Many of them can be irreverent, right? Racy. Vulgar. These are common qualities of most comics. Sometimes their humor goes too far, and they have to make a public apology. Sometimes when the humor goes too far, nothing happens because everyone knows that’s just their shtick. Imagine, however, growing up in the 50s or 60s, going to a nightclub, and watching a man with a mic cuss the night away. Bruce was that person, a man with no boundaries. ZERO boundaries whatsoever.
In 1974, just eight years after Bruce’s passing, director Bob Fosse released LENNY, a black-and-white autobiography – based on a play by Julian Barry – that scored six Academy Award nominations, was critically acclaimed, starred Dustin Hoffman, and has somehow left the film history books. The movie is perhaps overshadowed by Cabaret (1972) and All That Jazz (1979), Fosse’s other films that are considered classics in the movie musical genre. (The former earned him the Oscar for Best Director.) LENNY may not be a musical, but it shares that daring, almost disturbing exploration of the human condition that Fosse explored in his works. For example, All That Jazz has epic dance numbers, but what’s it about? DEATH. Death and dying.
LENNY further celebrates the director as one of the most audacious of his time, someone who wasn’t afraid to challenge censorship in movies. This is a very bleak film. There are terrible things said aloud. There are drugs. Bruce’s life was no happy story.
Filmed in sharp black-and-white in a cinéma vérité style by Bruce Surtees, LENNY wants to make you feel uneasy. It takes you to one of the crowded, dimly lit, claustrophobic nightclubs with the other guests, forced to watch Bruce’s routines become increasingly shocking. What was it about Bruce anyway? Why would we subject ourselves to such a troubled man? Fosse himself was fascinated by Bruce in that he would later base the lead character of All That Jazz, played by Roy Scheider, on a fictionalized version of Bruce.
In watching LENNY, we come to learn two things: Bruce wasn’t the most pleasant guy AND he was a genius satirist.
“He uses words as weapons to hit people over the head with and make them realize that they are being hypocritical with every phrase of their lives,” someone says at one point in the film.
“The point is we all live in a hypocritical society!” Bruce yells at a judge while trying to defend his humor after being arrested for being too obscene. (Yes, it’s true. He was arrested for cursing…)
In these moments, Lenny has a point. Yes, he says things that are revolting at times. In one cringe-worthy sequence, he says the n-word at least 20-30 times and other derogatory slurs. In another scene, he apologies to the audience for his behavior…before saying he would like to “piss” on them. No one laughs, and they shouldn’t, in my opinion. This is abhorrent.
Regardless of his crassness, however, Bruce was a genius in that he did what no one else did: expose the true side of humans, the “other,” meaner side, let’s say. In a decade when so many atrocities were going on and no one spoke up, Bruce took that stage and let the audience know that people could be hypocrites. People could claim to care for a cause or be scrupulous but were secretly immodest in some fashion. People cheated on their spouses but said they weren’t. People claimed to wait to have sex before marriage but lied. People stole. People lied. Everyone was flawed, in Bruce’s opinion, and he had a point. When other comics were too afraid to say this, he admitted it with full force. In LENNY, Fosse shows how complicated a man Bruce was. He was so troubled yet so ingenious.
When LENNY kicks off, you feel like you’re watching a low-budget documentary. We see different characters being interviewed by someone. (Fun fact: Fosse played the interviewer offscreen.) These people talk about the one-and-only Lenny Bruce. Flashback to the start of Lenny’s standup. There are crosscuts galore of Lenny performing, juxtaposed with quick shots of people drinking at the bar, close-ups of their grins and hands on drinks, their eyes not exactly staring at the stage. The chaos of it all mirrors Lenny’s soon-to-be tempestuous marriage to Honey (Valerie Perrine), a stripper he first sees in a cafeteria in Baltimore.
“He was just, I don’t know,” Honey recounts to why she was drawn to Lenny. “Huggable.”
Honey, described by Lenny as his “Shiksha goddess,” is a deeply insecure young woman. She has a childlike quality that eventually ends her up in jail, as we later see. Lenny is an escape for Honey, an opportunity for safety and security. His personality is something she needs to put up with, despite how hurtful it is. When she gets involved in a nasty car wreck, she later finds out that her husband slept with one of the nurses at the hospital. They fight, he buys her a car, and that’s the end of it.
As their nihilistic lifestyle worsens, the couple eventually begins snorting heroine. There are more fights, including monologues of Lenny attempting to rationalize his poor behavior to a crowd of people.
“Denial is the most important thing to do when your wife accuses you of cheating!” he says.
Lenny soon gets in trouble with the law, not for drugs but for using vulgar language in a public setting. At first, he shrugs at his arrests and chuckles while his lawyer tries to explain the reason for his shtick to a shocked jury. In the end, however, Lenny can no longer shrug. When his comedy – his own life – is threatened with being taken away by the law (THE LAW!), the vulnerable side of the comedian comes out. Lenny is scared, and Hoffman plays him to perfection in one of the film’s last scenes, a truly gut-wrenching moment. For Lenny, when you can’t be yourself, what else can you do? Sadly, we know what Lenny chose for himself in the end.
Fosse’s film is no easy ride, and you shouldn’t expect too many dance numbers like in his other films. We see time and time again how fame has played the destructive force for so many public figures in America. I don’t think Bruce was someone you’d immediately fall in love with, but man, was he bold.
LENNY is now available to stream on Tubi, Amazon Prime, and Pluto TV.