The Los Angeles Times described the film as "always lively" and "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". Variety called it "a highly entertaining movie that manages to pack in more or less every important thing you’d want to know about Tom Wolfe".