Black-and-Blue Comic

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

LENNY

Directed by BOB FOSSE Screenplay by JULIAN BARRY

Since his death by overdose in 1966, the myth of Lenny Bruce as an outlaw saint who gave his life to the cause of free speech has become an article of faith among the culturally disaffected of many moral, political and even sexual persuasions. According to their hagiography, Bruce was hounded into drugs, poverty, madness and finally suicide by a repressively puritanical Establishment. It is upon this belief that a Broadway show, several books and now Bob Fosse's movie have fed--or tried to feed.

Until now, the commercial results have surprised eager entrepreneurs by their failure to attain superhit status. It may be that there is less to Bruce's legend than meets the enthusiast's eye.

The facts that emerge from even the most sympathetic treatments of Bruce's life indicate that he was self-destructive long before an informal coalition of cops and lower-court judges ganged up to visit destruction on him. At its best and freshest in the late '50s and early '60s, Bruce's satire helped begin the process of cauterizing long-ignored social wounds. His use of previously forbidden words to make jokes about subjects long forbidden in public was in some small way liberating. Bruce insisted in his routines that all of us--Presidents and Popes, straights and gays, celebrities and commoners--share equally in the obscene anguish of an absurd existence. And he really should not have been punished for making the point.

Early Wounds. On the other hand, if he had been less wounded himself before he found his true comic voice, if he had not found doom so attractive, he could have survived assaults from the law at its lowest, least sensitive levels.

Lenny at least mentions the fact that Bruce contracted a tragic, mutually destructive marriage with a blonde stripper. It whispers that they were into heavy drugs and that he was forcing her into kinky sex long before the public or the cops took any notice of him. But the film does not explore this material with anything like the candor of Albert Goldman's recent biography.

Discretion may have been imposed upon Lenny's creators by their obligation to protect his survivors. But the film is equally without insight on a less private issue. It fails to explore why sudden and belated celebrity can bend the minds of lifelong flops like Bruce. It afflicts such people with a belief that now, having paid heavy dues, they are entitled to act out all their long-suppressed fantasies of power. The failure to deal with this point lends credence to the lurking suspicion that the moviemakers prefer myth-making to truth-telling.

Showfolk love martyrology as much as political people do. Fearing and loving the audience which has so much power over them, the temptation to present someone like Bruce as a misunderstood genius, an artist ahead of his reactionary times is irresistible. So Director Fosse cops out, buying and selling, without insight or irony, his protagonist's own version of his life and hard times. As he proved in Cabaret, he has a fine eye for the gritty details of the grimiest levels of show business, but here realism (the film is shot in grubby black and white) reinforces the mistaken belief that Fosse's account is the full truth about Lenny.

About one thing there can be no reservations, and that is the quality of the acting. Valerie Perrine is both lovely and touching as Bruce's wife; Stanley Beck manages to be both tricky and sympathetic as his agent. Gary Morton, best known until now as Lucille Ball's husband, does a funny, brutal turn as one of those comics who bill themselves "Mr. Entertainment." Finally, there is Dustin Hoffman in the title role, again asserting his claim to being today's great character leading man. His mimicry of Bruce's onstage mannerisms is uncanny, but what is awesome is the range of emotion he commands in the intimate scenes. Loving and loveless, adolescently joyful or darkly sadistic, paranoid and fearless, aggressive and pitiful, he gives a complex and mercurial performance. He alone makes Lenny worth seeing. It is finally the honesty, energy and intelligence he brings to his search for the truth about an elusive figure by which one measures the rest of the film--and finds it wanting. .Richard Schickel

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