Review: In ‘Radical Wolfe,’ a New Journalism lion roars on page, while his life is quieter

Had journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe been a painter, it’s arguable even murals wouldn’t have been large enough a medium for him. The white-suited gadfly of Virginian stock, Manhattan-sized prose and rocket-fueled renown died in 2018, but his literary legacy as the Big Bang of New Journalism lives on, even as a new documentary about him, “Radical Wolfe,” implies there will never be another. But talent and herculean commitment aside, today’s abandonment of the One Towering White Man’s Size Fits All school of American cultural storytelling (see Jann Wenner’s recent implosion) may not be such a bad thing.

Nevertheless, Richard Dewey’s revved-up bio documentary, at its least haphazard, is a sprightly look at what made the reporter-trained Wolfe into the insider’s outsider, how he made the leap to explicating — in supercharged, acrobatic sentences — our fast-changing, roving world of cliques, castes and subgroups. He found subjects that explained us as a whole: a NASCAR champion ignored by elites (“The Last American Hero”), freewheeling drug experimentation (“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”), an exclusive Leonard Bernstein fundraiser for jailed Black Panthers (“Radical Chic”). But most importantly, Tom Wolfe himself explained America — he was as essential to the package as his subjects.

Using clear-eyed admirer Michael Lewis’ 2015 Vanity Fair article “How Tom Wolfe Became … Tom Wolfe” as an organizing template, Dewey reconstructs the author’s life: Lewis is the primary on-screen interviewee, with Wolfe’s own voice sprinkled throughout (one supposes from his sit-downs with Lewis), while reminiscences and tributes are offered from those who knew him, got him, loved him: writer Gay Talese, agent Lynn Nesbit, journalist Tom Junod, his daughter Alexandra. Wolfe’s childhood isn’t really delved into, but from his time at Yale onward, we can sense what motivated him — courtesy in his personal life, indefatigability in his professional life and daredevil flamboyance on the page.

Tom Wolfe in his heyday.

(Sophie Bassouls / Sygma via Getty Images)

Excerpts are delivered in dutiful voice-over by Jon Hamm, but the stories behind the stories are the flavors we crave. As a young reporter, Wolfe rebuffed ambitious Sen. John F. Kennedy’s attempt to squelch an article. He forged his signature immersive style during an all-nighter, typing up what he thought were just the raw notes for a magazine piece on hot rodders he couldn’t crack, but which his Esquire editors were so blown away by, they published verbatim (“The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”). And that Bernstein Panthers party? How he crashed it is a snooping-journalist classic.

If “Radical Chic,” his rollicking satire of social-status liberalism, hasn’t aged as well as, say, his astronaut epic, “The Right Stuff,” Carter positions it thoughtfully for the current moment: You’ll want to read it (or read it again), but with former Panther Jamal Joseph’s perspective ringing in your head. Though the movie tries to paint Wolfe as neither Republican nor Democrat, his conservative politics were hardly a secret, reinforced by the occasional on-screen presence of praising right-wingers Niall Ferguson and, bizarrely, Peter Thiel.

The stratosphere that “The Bonfire of the Vanities” launched Wolfe into was, the documentary suggests, a blessing and a curse. A superstar journalist had cracked the Great American Novel (even if his tendencies were already novelistic), but its success also cemented him as the main attraction. Afterward, he could still pinpoint a ready-to-burst national conversation (campus sex with “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” immigration with “Back to Blood”), but Wolfe’s breathless, anthropological, Technicolor style was fast falling out of favor. Does anyone even remember he trashed Darwinism in his last published book, 2015’s “Kingdom of Speech”?

As tributes go, the documentary is always lively. Archival clips zip by and nobody ever gets more than a sentence or two before the film cuts away, which means it never burrows in as often as you might want it to, considering the colorful, thick life on display. One imagines the subject himself — the “Me Decade” coiner with the “Me” career — wondering why there isn’t more Wolfe in “Radical Wolfe.”