A nostalgic, or elegiac, sense that the most exciting and glamorous days of journalism and intellectual life are gone is no doubt part of what has driven a slate of documentaries, in recent years, on dead or dying writers, including Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill. Of course, Tom Wolfe should get the same treatment, and now he has in the limited-release documentary Radical Wolfe. Directed by Richard Dewey and drawing on a 2015 Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short), the film, narrated by the actor Jon Hamm, strives to get to the heart of Wolfe and his legacy. It only somewhat succeeds.

How many times, since Wolfe’s death in 2018, has it felt that the writer would punch a skeletal, white-suited fist through the soil of a graveyard and claw his way free? Material is everywhere, screaming to be satirized: A senile, octogenarian president battles his quadruple-indicted septuagenarian rival. Tech billionaires challenge each other to cage matches. Activist oil heiresses fight climate change. Guilt-ridden corporations endow millions of dollars to a “Center for Antiracist Research” that turns out not to do anything. A New Jersey senator is accused of hoarding gold bars from foreign dictatorships. Any day now, surely, a Cadillac spewing onomatopoeia and exclamation points — vroommm, vrrroo-OOMMMMM!!!!! — will careen around the corner, a cream fedora glinting behind the windshield.