"American: The Bill Hicks Story," opens here today, offering an opportunity to watch a comic channel Lenny Bruce, who did it all and did it better more than a half-century earlier. There's nothing wrong in watching another person follow a similar path to too-early death, but reading reviews of the documentary on Hicks makes me think that too many of the writers never had heard Bruce, or his albums, or the 1974 movie, "Lenny," that starred Dustin Hoffman.
The film, produced and directed by Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas, is interesting, but flawed. They interviewed a lot of people about Hicks, a bitter, profane satirist of much of the American way of life, but they interviewed only fans, leaving an extremely unbalanced story. Hicks was a southern boy who didn't drink or use drugs until he was in his late teens, but he, like Bruce, made up for it in the last decade of his life. Hicks died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32. Bruce made it to 40 before he died of a drug overdose in 1966.
Hicks is a legitimate descendant of Bruce (George Carlin and Richard Pryor came between them), and his riffs on consumerism and politics have a proper sting, as did the work of his predecessors.
For some reason, Harlock and Thomas also saw fit to use some third-rate, cheesy animation along the way, making the film look like a school project that received a failing grade.
American: The Bill Hicks Story opens today as part of the Webster University Film Series and runs through Sunday at the Winifred Moore Auditorium
—Joe