A 71-minute doc about Tom Wolfe, Radical Wolfe (2023) shows too much and comments on too much. Plus it makes a mistake in featuring clips from the film versions of Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities while sentences from the books are read aloud. Wolfe didn’t direct those movies!

All the same, Tom Wolfe is here, and engaging, and Richard Dewey‘s doc is usually honest. The huge-in-journalism (unlike journos today) author had many interests, exhibited well after the “intellectual Left” in college exasperated him. He explored New York City, a blue metropolis in all its disjointedness, in Bonfire. Dewey may not see the essential conservatism in this novel and others, but it’s there. . . Granted, I don’t like all of Wolfe’s writings, but his is an outstanding—and important—American success story, journalistic and, up to a point, implacably political. Thus I call it important.