To judge from his film’s style, it also seems likely that Dewey just doesn’t have the patience for a subtle approach. Sections of this informative but unimaginative movie are presented as hectic montages in an apparent attempt to mirror Wolfe’s speedy, ebullient prose, which was modeled in part on the writing of the brilliant and utterly disreputable French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
“Radical Wolfe” derives primarily from Michael Lewis’s 2015 Vanity Fair profile of Wolfe, and Lewis is the movie’s most prominent voice. Among the other interviewees are fellow New Journalism stars Gay Talese and Gail Sheehy; satirical novelist Christopher Buckley; historian Niall Ferguson; and Wolfe’s daughter, Alexandra Wolfe. (Also featured, for no evident reason, is controversial tech financier Peter Thiel.) Their remarks are interlaced with abundant interview clips of Wolfe and others — including journalistic fellow traveler and unlikely Wolfe pal Hunter S. Thompson — and excerpts from Wolfe’s writings, read somberly in voice-over by Jon Hamm.
Wolfe grew up in Richmond and went to graduate school at Yale. It was at the latter, Lewis argues, that the future writer began to define himself in opposition to the dominant liberal culture. He would later mock left-wing pieties, most notably in a devastating piece about a 1970 party at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment where wealthy New Yorkers assembled to salute the Black Panthers. The article was titled “Radical Chic,” an expression that survives in American culture, and in the title of this film.
Wolfe began writing professionally as a beat reporter for several newspapers, including The Washington Post, before the career-defining development that every Wolfe fan will already know: In 1963, unable to complete a story on California’s custom-car boom for Esquire, he instead sent a fevered 49-page memo to editor Byron Dobell, who simply excised Wolfe’s salutations and ran the stream-of-consciousness letter as the article. The style of “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” was an accident but soon became purposeful.
The film also recounts another, lesser-known creation tale: When Wolfe had his first suit made, it was a white one meant for summer, but the fledgling New York journalist selected fabric that was too heavy for hot weather. So he wore the suit in winter, beginning a sartorial tradition of always wearing light-colored formal clothes, soon accompanied by dandified accessories. Remarkably, he still managed to blend into the background while sporting these outfits.
The blending in lasted only through 1979’s “The Right Stuff,” an account of Wolfe’s usual subject — status conflict — that was taken for a heroic saga of NASA’s first astronauts. (It became that in a celebrated 1983 movie adaptation.) Then came Wolfe’s fateful turn to fiction, which yielded two novels that were praised — overpraised, in my view — and two more that weren’t. Ferguson, kindly, predicts that Wolfe’s fiction will be “rediscovered.”
“Radical Wolfe” spends a few moments on three prominent authors, John Irving, John Updike and Norman Mailer, who disparaged Wolfe’s novels. It allows Jamal Joseph, a former Black Panther who was in prison at the time of Bernstein’s party, to voice his disapproval of “Radical Chic.” And it claims that New Yorker staffers held a grudge long after Wolfe’s 1965 swipe at the magazine, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead.”
Yet Lewis concludes, quite plausibly, that “most of the New York literary establishment just loved him.” This affection suggests that, while his writing was smart, funny and innovative, Wolfe ultimately wasn’t all that radical. His own quest for higher status was a mainstream success.
Unrated. At the Avalon. Contains strong language. 76 minutes.