Synopsis
The story of acerbic 1960s comic Lenny Bruce, whose groundbreaking, no-holds-barred style and social commentary was often deemed by the establishment as too obscene for the public.
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Cast
- Dustin HoffmanLenny Bruce
- Valerie PerrineHoney Bruce
- Jan MinerSally Marr
- Stanley BeckArtie Silver
- Frankie ManBaltimore Comic
- Rashel NovikoffAunt Mema
- Gary MortonSherman Hart
- Guy RennieJack Goldstein
- Michele YongeNurse
- Kathryn WittGirl
Recommendations
- 90
Variety
Bob Fosse's remarkable film version of Julian Barry's legit play, Lenny, stars Dustin Hoffman in an outstanding performance. - 80
Empire
If Fosse's film fails to capture the man or his art completely, it remains a damn good place to start. - 75
TV Guide Magazine
Harsh, funny, grim, and, like all Bob Fosse's films, primarily concerned with the intersection of life and showbiz. - 70
New York Magazine (Vulture)
Tailored to a point rather than to comprehensive biography, its triumph is its touch upon the public nerve of our most private inhibition. [30 Dec 1974, p.86] - 63
Chicago Sun-Times
Fosse’s attempt to give us Lenny Bruce as society’s victim and a martyr to noble causes never quite works, and so the movie becomes just several good scenes and a fine Hoffman performance, not a persuasive portrait of a man. - 60
The New York Times
One-fourth of the film is so brilliant—and so brilliantly acted by Dustin Hoffman—that it helps cool one's impatience with the rest of the film, which is much more fancily edited and photographed but no more profound than those old movie biographies Jack L. Warner used to grind out about people like George Gershwin, Mark Twain and Dr. Ehrlich. - 60
Chicago Reader
Dustin Hoffman is superb as Lenny Bruce, but he gives an actor's performance where a less declamatory, more comedic delivery would have worked better. - 50
The New Yorker
Despite the fluent editing and the close-in documentary techniques and the sophisticated graphics, the pictures is a later version of the one-to-one correlation of an artist's life and his art which we used to get in movies about painters and songwriters. Hoffman makes a serious, honorable try, but his Lenny is a nice boy. Lenny Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice.
