Lenny: High-Wire Act

He did not, however, have the clout to get the film made without a big name. Cliff Gorman would not sell tickets; Dustin Hoffman would, and the country’s most popular Jewish movie star playing its most notorious Jewish comedian felt like such a natural sell that nobody even needed to say it out loud. Years later, Fosse did put Gorman in All That Jazz as the star of The Stand-up, the Lenny-esque movie within the movie, possibly as a make-good to him but just as possibly as a finger in Hoffman’s eye. According to Sam Wasson’s biography Fosse, the director and his leading man were at odds even before a single frame of Lenny was shot. Hoffman didn’t think the script had a story, didn’t think Fosse knew how to direct actors, and bristled at—and finally ignored—Fosse’s insistence that he forgo doing research for the role. When Hoffman returned to New York after a trip to Los Angeles brimming with new information about Bruce’s personality and performance technique that he had gleaned from talking to the comic’s friends and colleagues, Fosse declined to add any of his discoveries to the script. “What do you find funny about Lenny Bruce?” the exasperated star finally asked him. Fosse’s reply: “I don’t think Lenny Bruce is funny.” Hoffman immediately tried to get out of the film.

One doesn’t have to take sides in the dispute between two intensely driven perfectionists to see that Hoffman is not an ideal fit for the role; the friction that that generates is one of the things that makes Lenny fascinating. Reality turned out to be more complicated than “They’re both Jewish,” given that Hoffman’s and Bruce’s approaches, worldviews, and even speaking styles came from wildly different parts of the Jewish tradition. As artists, they differed just as much: Hoffman tended to build his characters from within, trying to understand everything about them, working from and toward empathy, and in Lenny, he was tasked with playing a man who was not especially empathetic and—except in court—not all that interested in being understood. As many critics noted at the time, Hoffman doesn’t look or sound all that much like Bruce; it’s easy to understand his plea to Fosse that they just invent a new character from whole cloth and call the movie Benny. But as you watch him perform Bruce’s routines in the movie—many of them verbatim—it’s impossible not to appreciate the work of a brilliant actor internalizing his subject syllable by syllable, trying to make sense of him and trying to help us make sense of him.

Fosse was coming from a different place, and his icy, at times detached objectivity works with—and against—Hoffman’s essential warmth in ways that increase the movie’s power. Late in the development of Lenny, Fosse and Barry came up with the idea, extraordinarily novel for the time, of structuring the movie as a mock documentary, with on-camera interviews with Bruce’s survivors—his widow, Honey (played with affecting sincerity by Valerie Perrine); his mother, Sally Marr; and his manager—interspersed with scenes from his life, relationships, and trials both literal and figurative. Fosse decided to shoot the film in black and white (along with Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, Lenny was one of the first 1970s studio movies to opt out of color). But there is nothing gentle or nostalgic about the bravura high-contrast work of the young cinematographer Bruce Surtees—Lenny often looks as if it’s shining a flashlight in its characters’ faces. The film’s visual aesthetic is harsh and unrelenting, and the quasi-documentary format eventually suggests that Fosse is interrogating the act of interrogation itself—he’s asking questions about how much truth there can possibly be in any movie that purports to show you a life, and, perhaps, about how much Lenny Bruce’s routines were an attempt at raw honesty, and how much they were an unconscious means of disguise. Can we “get” Lenny? Did Lenny get himself?

Questions about performance versus reality define not just Lenny but Fosse’s entire filmography. Sweet Charity—which had its origins in Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria—is about a taxi dancer (Shirley MacLaine) whose job it is to sell the lie of romance to her customers even as she finds herself succumbing to it. Cabaret treats many of its musical numbers as escapes from the ugly truths of the outside world, then has those ugly truths reassert themselves as showbiz razzle-dazzle. And the movies with which Fosse followed Lenny, All That Jazz and Star 80 (1983), are even darker, ending, as Lenny does, in death and suggesting that those invested in creating illusions—of art, of beauty, of stage magic—are all spiraling toward the same fate. As perhaps Fosse knew he was. All That Jazz wasn’t lying; he really did have his first cardiac crisis while pounding down the addictive prescription drug Dexamyl as he simultaneously edited Lenny and staged the new musical Chicago, in which life is one big production number featuring murder, manipulation, and serial lying. With every subsequent project, Fosse’s work becomes more urgent, more death-haunted, more terrifying. In that context, Lenny feels like the last moment before he leaps off the cliff: the film is a coolly controlled performance piece about a man whose coolly controlled performance pieces made him famous—until he started to lose his cool and control.

Lenny is not an inviting movie in the same way that Lenny Bruce was not an inviting man. Fosse stayed true to his statement to Hoffman; he did not make a film that was likely to persuade anyone that Bruce was particularly funny. The story starts and ends with him bombing onstage, the first time because he tries to be somebody else, and the last because he cannot manage to get out of his own head. And yet along the way, Bruce becomes both the sympathetic figure that Hoffman wanted him to be and the case study that Fosse saw him as. The last, bleakest third of the film, in which Bruce faces endless legal crises and is shattered by his inability to surmount them with the only tool at his disposal, his words, is both moving and deeply disquieting; sixty years does not seem to be reassuringly long past a moment when an artist could face four months in a workhouse—the sentence Bruce was fighting at the time of his death—for saying dirty words onstage.

The gravity of the threat Bruce was confronting is brought home in a sequence at the end of Lenny that depicts the performer at his lowest and showcases both director and star at the height of their powers. Here, the clashing approaches of Fosse, Hoffman, and Bruce come together beautifully, perhaps because they’re all, in different ways, forensic. Ruined by drugs and by legal woes, Bruce takes the stage in a club one more time, maybe one last time. In a scene that Fosse presents in one unbroken seven-minute take, Bruce rails against the police, the judges, the hypocrisy of his persecutors. He paces, slumps, sits on the rail of the stage, stands up again, chases and loses his thoughts, fumbles frantically for meaning, can’t remember what he was going to say, and eventually disintegrates into a narcotic haze. The audience watches with sorrow and respect, and so does Fosse, who positions Surtees’s camera slightly to the side, high up in an apparently tiered performance space that makes Hoffman look like a subject in an old-fashioned medical theater—a cadaver-to-be. There is no flashiness or showy technique in the scene, only an actor trying to embody a tragedy in progress and a filmmaker who knows that all he can ultimately do is bear witness. You don’t have to have been there to get it.