["Lenny"] looks to be about three-fourths dramatized biography and one-fourth recreated stage performances….

This one-fourth of the film is so brilliant … that it helps cool one's impatience with the rest of the film, which is much more fancily edited and photographed but no more profound than those old movie biographies Jack L. Warner used to grind out about people like George Gershwin, Mark Twain and Dr. Ehrlich. In movies, now as then, genius is principally defined by the amount of time spent dealing with disappointment….

However, "Lenny" is never very precise about what happened to Lenny or why….

[The] interviews are full of phony, simulated cinéma vérité-type irrelevancies in speech and manner that you never for a minute believe, any more than you believe that Lenny was just a sweet brilliant fellow who had some hard luck.

The movie makes no point of Lenny's terrible...