It tells a story (rather than the story, as biopics conventionally insist) of Lenny Bruce, an irreverent, iconoclastic standup comedian who ran afoul of American obscenity laws in the last years before the cultural revolution of the late sixties, even as he helped to change them. It contrasts modes of black-and-white cine-matography, making them forms into themselves. Lenny is an interme-dial biographical collage that straddles divergent narrative strands, subjectivi-ties, mid-twentieth-century periods. He developed a film style that eschewed conventional chronology, aiming for an atempo-ral juxtapositional montage closer to poetry and the live performing arts than the narrative causality and temporality of Hollywood cinema. As an intermedial artist, with equal facility for the stage and movies, Fosse approached film editing with the rhythmic intricacy of his dance style. Bob Fosse directed Lenny (1974), about the profane American comedian Lenny Bruce at a time when he had won complete artistic control over his films.
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