Lenny (1974) ***

Everyone knows Lenny Bruce's name, but I never really knew anything about the famous comedian until he appeared as a character in the Amazon Prime show, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” On the show, Bruce befriends Mrs. Maisel, and Luke Kirby plays him as he reportedly was: a drug-using, foul-mouthed, iconoclastic sage. Bruce shook the comedy world of the 50's and 60's with his frank commentaries on sex, race, and politics. He was arrested many times for obscenity, and ultimately came to be seen as a First Amendment warrior.

Bob Fosse directed this 1974 Bruce biopic, and it's a hot mess! Based on a play by Julian Barry, the movie follows Lenny's career and tumultuous private life. The story picks up with Lenny (played by Dustin Hoffman) meeting his future wife, a stripper named Honey (Valerie Perrine). It follows his career as he gains success by leaving behind safe comedy to discuss taboo topics. Along the way, Lenny and Honey develop drug habits that complicate their lives. Ultimately, Lenny draws the attention of the Law, and thus begins the series of arrests that ruined him, but also made him famous.

As a film, “Lenny” is like the man, a beautiful failure. Director Bob Fosse probably knew he was making a mess of the story. His own autobiopic (“All That Jazz”) portrays Fosse as going crazy trying to edit a difficult movie, and that movie was “Lenny.” Still, the film won a lot of awards, and is generally critically acclaimed, with great performances by Dustin Hoffman and the adorable Valerie Perrine. The story is told like a documentary, with interviews with Honey and others from Lenny's life intercut with flashback scenes, including quite a few scenes of his standup shows. Unfortunately, it is overlong and, honestly, boring. Some of the standup is interesting, and Perrine's nude scenes are easy to look at, but many scenes just go on forever. One of Lenny's bad standup shows, where he is stoned out of his mind on heroin, goes on way after we have gotten the point. Even one sex scene falls flat. Lenny has bullied Honey into swinging with other girls, so there is a montage of threesomes. We know that Honey doesn't want to be there, and the whole thing is just uncomfortable rather than erotic.

Bob Fosse did a lot of things: dancing, choreography, directing for the stage, and directing films. Out of all his artistic endeavors, I don't know what he was best at, but I don't think it was film. I honestly think that with these actors and this subject, there's a great film here that just needed a better director to edit it down by about half an hour, making the scenes tighter and the story move along. As it is, it's still a worthwhile movie, but, like Lenny himself, it has some fatal flaws.

3 stars out of 5