Reeling Backward: Lenny (1974)

Dustin Hoffman's masterful performance as the original shock comic is an abject lesson in the price paid by those who arrive ahead of their time, even if just a little.

The great irony of Lenny Bruce’s story, of course, is that he was ahead of his time — but not by very much.

The things that got him arrested, hounded by the establishment and effectively deplatformed would be become passé very shortly after his 1966 death due to a drug overdose. Soon you could not only say “cocksucker,” the word that first got him in trouble, you could actually do it in a movie that respectable people paid money to see.

The original shock comic briefly became a major cultural figure during the early 1960s, with ribald and biting commentary that took aim at mainstream mores and urged people to adjust the lens of how they saw the world. Julian Barry turned Lenny Bruce’s life story into a play just five years after his passing, and would adapt it for the screen in 1974 with Bob Fosse directing after the huge success of “Cabaret.”

It’s mostly remembered now for Dustin Hoffman’s masterful performance, one that shows Lenny in all his genius and charm but also his egotism, drug addiction and cruelty — much of the latter directed at his wife, Honey, played by Valerie Perrine in a turn no less startling in its emotional nakedness than Hoffman’s.

I’ll admit I had mostly regarded Perrine by her subsequent roles, which tended to relegate her to the brassy, big-boobed bombshell persona that would come to follow her. Despite playing a stripper, known by her stage name “Hot Honey Harlow,” Perrine is passive and vulnerable, though as seen in flashback interviews after Lenny’s death, she would trade in her pitiable nature for a more assertive and at-peace one.

Honey Bruce, who married Lenny shortly after they met and divorced him six years later, would become the fiercest defender of his legacy after he was gone. It’s fair to say that “Lenny” the movie might not have happened without her.

Perrine and Hoffman would both earn Oscar nominations in the lead acting categories, along with nods for Best Picture, screenplay, director and Bruce Surtees’ gorgeous black-and-white cinematography — losing all. Perrine actually won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.

The story is told in a series of contemporaneous interviews with people who knew Lenny, and their memories form the flashbacks that make up the meat of the movie. In addition to Honey, primary memorialists include his manager, Artie Silver (Stanley Beck), and Lenny’s mother, Sally (Jan Miner) — both figures who proclaimed to love and support him, but acted as enablers for his worst behavior as long as it kept the cash rolling in.

And of course there are many extended sequences of Lenny on stage doing his act, which if you’ve ever watched any archival footage, smartly reproduce his manic energy and seemingly off-the-cuff observations of societal foibles and contradictions. His satire was sharp enough to slice.

Lenny was among the first to defend homosexuals and other marginalized populations, while attacking America’s comfortable relationship with violence. He spoke out against the war in Vietnam before it was even in the headlines, talking about it as John F. Kennedy’s big mistake — a pointed reminder for the widespread ahistorical assumption that it was something LBJ started.

(It wasn’t even Kennedy, or Eisenhower, but Truman who first sent U.S. “advisory” troops there.)

In one bit Lenny says he’d rather watch a stag film rather than a mainstream shoot-em-up Western, questioning which is really more obscene: a depiction of flesh caressed versus destroyed by gunfire. He was a pacifist raconteur, not anti-American per se but very much against the ways in which we delude and distract ourselves from harsh truths about U.S. actions abroad and at home.

Much of the first act of the movie is taken up with Lenny and Honey’s whirlwind romance, which would result in them doing a double act for awhile: he jokes, she sang (or tried to). An older, famous comic named Sherman Hart (Gary Morton) offers to give Lenny a leg up, while running his hand over Honey’s leg, advising him to ditch the blue material. Of course, Lenny gives the middle finger to that.

Lenny was a serial philanderer, sleeping with the nurse at the hospital where Honey recuperates after a serious car accident. Even the arrival of their daughter, Kitty, fails to slow his appetite for other women. Rather than trying to hide it, Lenny taunts Honey with his infidelity, and also introduces her to hard drugs.

After their divorce, Honey gets busted in Mexico for marijuana possession and winds up serving a couple of years in prison. It’s during this time that Lenny’s career really takes off, as well as the beginning of his arrests and court cases.

A writer from Time magazine shows up to do a story on Lenny, which turns out to be a hit piece, which he gleefully reads from the stage. It would become a hallmark of his decline, talking about himself and his legal troubles with no attempt to spin a joke into the works, and people began to shuffle out of the audience. This seemed to bother Lenny even more than the threat of prison.

Lenny claimed not to be an important cultural figure, just a guy trying to make a buck. “I’m a hustler. As long as they’ll give, I’ll grab!” he insists. But his loss of influence clearly bothers him. Hoffman is careful to show the extraordinary bravado Lenny put up, and how it concealed a typical anxiety-ridden New York comedian shtick.

“Lenny” is a portrait of a guy who was not afraid to say anything on the stage, but riddled with fear that people would stop listening. If he had arrived just a decade later, I’ve no doubt Lenny Bruce would be remembered today as a comedic giant on par with George Carlin or Richard Pryor.