Critic Reviews

Vreeland’s documentary serves as both a wonderfully evocative time capsule and a candid tribute to a pair of artistic legends.

An anecdote concerning the “amusing, bright, and always very vinegary” Gore Vidal being caught by a woman police officer breaking into Williams’s New York apartment would, alone, make Truman & Tennessee required viewing.

Ultimately, Truman & Tennessee is a fascinating but melancholy mash note to the enduring friendship of two genius misfits who, despite constant self doubt barely masked by a raconteur’s seeming insouciance, rocked the literary (and cinematic, despite their mutual distaste for filmic adaptations) world at, in hindsight, just the right time.

Drawling, florid Southern homosexuals who were “out” long before that was done, or safe to do, they make a fascinating, intensely quotable pair of wits in Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, a documentary built on their relationship with each other, their art, their respective psyches, fame and the world they lived in.

The emotional tone here is sympathetic and elegiac, and since both men have a way with words, often absorbing. Though there is little here that won’t be known by fans of the writers, the format of the interviews is striking.

the connections drawn in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation are sufficiently instructive that watching and listening to these writers is also, in a way, like hearing one author in stereo.

Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Portrait’s staid approach doesn’t always cohere into a gripping yarn but it is detailed, boasts a real feel for the fiction and, in-between the two men’s rampant viciousness, emerges as undeniably poignant.

It’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in the resurrected company of these two intellects, but the experience feels like the lazy alternative to reading biographies about either man, while the iMovie-style editing strategy of slow-fading between layers of old photographs makes them feel like ghosts of a long-forgotten past.