‘Radical Wolfe’ Review: A Documentary Pays Lively Tribute to the Writing, and Daring, of Tom Wolfe
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Of all the stories and sides of Leonard Bernstein that Bradley Cooper decided to leave out of “Maestro,” the most infamous is surely the “Radical Chic” episode.
In 1970, a New York magazine cover story, written by Tom Wolfe and entitled “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” spent 20,000 words describing, in delectable you-are-there detail, a party thrown by Lenny and his wife, Felicia, at their Park Avenue apartment to raise funds for the Black Panthers.
Several of the Panthers were there, mingling with the swells of aristocratic liberal New York, and Wolfe captured the contradictions of that evening in a tone of such scathing perception that it was as if he’d defined the concept of bourgeois political correctness, disemboweled it, and danced on its grave, all in the same moment.
In “Radical Wolfe,” a lively, impeccably chiseled portrait of Tom Wolfe, who died in 2018 (this is the first documentary about him), we hear how Wolfe came to write that essay.
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