The film stands as a better tribute than it does a memoir in its avoidance of Lenny's transitional periods. (What put the sting in Bruce's act after years of doing Catskills shtick goes maddeningly unexplored.) Dazzling though Lenny may be, it's nonetheless akin to watching the key episodes of a TV series and skipping those that focus on character rather than on mythology, while Hoffman does a better job of playing the titular comedian backstage, largely because that's the Lenny Bruce for which there's little to no basis of comparison for those familiar with the real Bruce's stand-up. Hoffman's performance is always potent, but in front of a crowd, reciting the gospel according to Lenny Bruce, he's transparently excited about this career opportunity, giddy like a kid getting to swear in community theatre--even when Lenny is stoned out of his gourd. A passage in which a doped Lenny, wit deteriorating besides, rants in the glare of the spotlight wearing only a raincoat and drawing corollaries between the Vietnam conflict and his obscenity charges derives its intensity from Fosse's decision to shoot it in one hugely uncompromising long-take from afar. Exposing Hoffman-as-Lenny to so much flop sweat, the sequence is a Method trial if the actor ever had one.

Lenny holds Lenny Bruce up as a symbol of the tug of war in which censorship and freedom of expression are forever engaged. There's only one extra on the DVD release, but it's fascinating in this context: the film's theatrical trailer from 1974, which lets you know that this is the story of a man persecuted in his time (Bruce died of an overdose in 1966) for saying what is now commonplace. That may have been the feeling in 1974 (certainly Pauline Kael's review from the era reflects such an attitude: she more or less accuses Barry's play of making stale protests), but it's far from the truth today. Think post-Bruce nightclub patrons would greet a white comic with apathy now or even then for dichotomizing them according to ethnicity--employing racial epithets to the task, at that?

Apart from Fosse's occasionally vérité aesthetic, something that never ceases to be in vogue (it's the language of TV journalism, after all), Lenny remains effective for Bruce's heartrending courtroom plea: "Don't take away my words!" The film is infuriating and sad--it lingers and has endured--because Bruce's ideas are still radical; his legacy is arguably that now you can say "cocksucker" in a licensed venue without getting arrested--whoop-de-do. Fosse was accused of sanctifying Bruce, but it's too squirmy a portrait for that to occur (the men to which I have shown the film cringe at the memory of Hoffman's Lenny goading his stripper wife (a sensational Valerie Perrine), the prototypical Madonna-whore, into lesbian experimentation); what gets martyred is satire, which takes its lumps to expand the people's privileges every time. (You'll recall that Larry Flynt's goofs on Jerry Falwell in "Hustler" in the 1980's led to the galvanization of the First Amendment.) A movie that trades on the word "hip" (Bruce was the eternal hipster, even if Hoffman's portrayal fails to communicate that), Lenny resonates twenty-eight years later.

Presented at 1.85:1 in sparkling black-and-white anamorphic widescreen by MGM on DVD (with a marginally unmatted version on the flipside), the disc's transfer presents the film almost free of print debris. A large percentage of the image defects, such as soft-focused shots, are purposeful; truthfully, Lenny has never looked terrible on home video, but the DVD's excellent shadow detail brings out a heretofore unseen crispness in Bruce Surtees' cinematography. The Dolby 2.0 mono soundtrack is serviceable, and the aforementioned trailer rounds out the package.-Bill Chambers