Bob Fosse and Julian Barry are singularly unsuccessful at suggesting the complexity beneath the masks of [Lenny Bruce in Lenny]. Where the camp extravagance of Cabaret was a fitting metaphor for the theatricality that both masked and exaggerated the incipient frenzy of Nazi Germany, Fosse's staging of Lenny at all times serves to obscure his subject. Lenny's wife, mother and agent (themselves put across in unnuanced, stereotypic roles) are interviewed in the present, and at every point in Lenny's career Fosse cuts back for their view of events—a technique guaranteed to flatten out the film by showing the comedian who insisted on speaking for himself (down to the final, self-destructive obsessiveness with which he pored over and expounded on his trial transcripts) through the eyes of less articulate observers…. Although writer and director recognise that Bruce was obsessed with the tyranny of social stereotypes, they fail to...