Directed by Richard Dewey, based on the Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis, and enlivened by voiceover readings from the period-appropriate Jon Hamm, Radical Wolfe is a streamlined documentary biopic of Tom Wolfe, the most visible and verbose of the founding scriveners of the New Journalism. The film is the latest in a media-minded cycle of documentaries casting a wistful glance back at a bygone epoch, before the onset of digital communication, when print was ascendent, prose was read on paper, and the writer—not yet “content creator”—hunted-and-pecked out the words on an analog typewriter the size of a Frigidaire. The cohort includes Griffin Dunne’s portrait of his aunt, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017), Ebs Burnough’s The Capote Tapes (2019), and the best of the lot, Lizzie Gottlieb’s Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (2022). The last of these ends on a serendipitous cinema verité moment too good to be scripted: Caro and Gottlieb enter the offices of Alfred Knopf and need a pencil to copyedit Caro’s manuscript. “A pencil?” ask the befuddled Millennials.
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