In magazine articles, non-fiction books and novels, Tom Wolfe coined era-defining phrases like “The Me Decade,” “Radical Chic” and “The Right Stuff.”

A “helluva reporter” and a master stylist, the courtly, dapper Richmond-born Wolfe underscored his legacy when he started talking about writing a “Vanity Fair” for the America of the 1980s.

“The Bonfire of the Vanities” became just that, a scalding and amusing snapshot of the “Greed is Good” Reagan decade in America. And his obituary writers — Wolf died in 2018 — had the perfect comparison. He was America’s William Makepeace Thackeray — its keenest 20th century observer and satirist.

“Radical Wolfe” is a new documentary appreciation of the perpetual “outsider,” an Ivy League trained best-seller whose Southernness made him stand out in the world of New York journalism and publishing of the 1970s and onwards.

The film, inspired by a Michael Lewis (“Moneyball,” “The Big Short, “The Blind Side,””Liar’s Poker”) magazine article and relying much on Lewis’s take on the man, the writer and his self-created mythos, is a reminder of Wolfe’s once-giantic footprint in the culture.

Wolfe was a best-seller from an era when a best-selling book — fiction or non-fiction — could dominate the national conversation, something amply demonstrated by “Radical Wolfe’s” many samples of Wolfe interviews — by Cavett and Letterman, Rose and Buckley — and breathless TV coverage of the “lines around the block” at bookstores, eagerly awaiting “A Man in Full,” his Southern affluence-skewering followup to “Vanities.”

A white-suited dandy and gifted raconteur, Wolfe “invented” that look and persona, he freely admitted during his lifetime. “He wanted to be noticed,” and he was, Lewis and others note.

He was “such a polite man,” good-mannered and gentle, but “a terrorist with a pen” who eviscerated big city elites and made lifelong enemies as he “reported” on things he witnessed and took lots of notes on.

Leonard Bernstein’s reputation, it is implied, never quite recovered from the way Wolfe reported on an ego-tripping, dilettantish Bernstein party/fundraiser for the Black Panthers political party in tony New York in 1970.

“Radical chic” became the ultimate putdown of such poseurs, rich entitled swells mingling with hip, edgy and politicized members of the underclasses.

Lewis and others marvel at how Wolfe was able to infiltrate and fit in with an emerging Southern California car-modifying culture or pre-“brand” NASCAR or cozy up to first-generation NASA astronauts, to find a singular figure representing a larger point and an “overlooked America” — often southern, like NASCAR’s Junior Johnson, “The Last American Hero,” or test pilot Chuck Yeager, the embodiment of “The Right Stuff.”

But it was the writing — inventing a self-referential, slangy, onomatopoeia-phrasing that delighted millions and enraged his rivals as “New Journalism” — that made Wolfe a publishing phenomenon and a fan favorite.

“The world was used to enormous egos in artists, actors, entertainers of all sorts, in politicians, sports figures, and even journalists, because they had such familiar and convenient ways to show them off. But that slim young man over there in uniform, with the enormous watch on his wrist and the withdrawn look on his face, that young officer who is so shy that he can’t even open his mouth unless the subject is flying— that young pilot— well, my friends, his ego is even bigger!— so big, it’s breathtaking!”

A relatively brief documentary, “Radical Wolfe” trips through the creation of the various works that “made” Wolfe, “The Right Stuff” being the crowning achievement of his non-fiction years. The film skips back to give us some of the origin story, a privileged young man — son of an agronomist and magazine editor — educated at Washington & Lee and then Yale where he first noticed how Northern elites look down their noses at the South.

Wolfe cultivated his “outsider” status, friends and Lewis agree. Upon graduating, he didn’t venture into the high-flying world he’d inhabit straight-away. He became a cub reporter at the Springfield, Massachusetts newspaper, learning the ropes and becoming a stand-out by standing up to young John F. Kennedy (pictured above), who tried to turn a frank discussion of how Washington worked to local business leaders into an “off the record” talk. Cub reporter Wolfe wasn’t having it.

Wolfe’s “eureka” moment is revisited, with Esquire editor Byron Dobell remembering how a “blocked” Wolfe sent him a long letter, filled with his notes on that California car customizing story that he said he could not write. Dobell published the “letter,” and that breakout, breezy, flippant and funny piece — “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” — became “The New Journalism,” a phrase Wolfe coined to describe using everything in the fiction writer’s arsenal in nonfiction stories.

His amusing, fake-feud relationship with fellow “new journalist” Hunter S. Thompson is related (Thompson “hated” being lumped into that genre), and his real-feud with novelists Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving, aka “My Three Stooges,” is remembered.

And Wolfe’s pinnacle, the glories of “The Last American Hero” and the Oscar-winning classic “The Right Stuff” becoming great movies, and the decline that seemed to set in after “The Bonfire of the Vanities” became an epic bomb is documented.

Junior Johnson — a book subject then and an interview subject here — and friendly colleagues like Gail Sheehy and Gay Talese fill in the man and his gift for fitting in with different groups he was writing about. And Jon Hamm reads snippets of Wolfe’s works, although that hardly seems necessary, as many public readings as Wolfe gave were captured on video over the decades.

The film is entirely too brief for Wolfe fans. But Lewis is the right writer to build this Wolfe appreciation around, as he can rightly be considered Wolfe’s peer as a reporter — a thorough, immersive master of non-fiction. I’m a big fan. But neither Lewis nor anyone else writing today could hold a candle to Wolfe’s gifts as a stylist in the English language.

Like Wolfe, Lewis has a gift for finding unheralded, representative figures and spinning them into heroes of his narratives — Billy Bean of “Moneyball,” Michael Oher of “The Blind Side.” But his effort to fold his own myth into Wolfe’s story backfires hilariously with his first words on camera, the first words in the film.

Princeton man Lewis remembers “discovering” Tom Wolfe on his corporate lawyer father’s bookshelves, and feeling blessed because he was, at the time, growing up in “New Orleans, not a particularly literary place.”

“New Orleans.” “Not a particularly literary place?” Where Tennessee Williams lived and caught the Streetcar, where Faulkner and Bukowski and F. Scott and Walker Percy and Lillian Hellman sojourned, where Anne Rice and James Lee Burke lived, and John Kennedy Toole discovered “A Confederacy of Dunces?”

As Lewis notes in “Radical Wolfe,” that Twain/Hemingway-based “all writers” feel the need to become larger-than-life characters thing was a part of Wolfe’s makeup and became something of a trap, a persona he couldn’t shake.

But privileged Michael Lewis trying spin a literarily deprived childhood in one of America’s most literary cities is like Steve Martin’s narration in “The Jerk,” the bit about being “born a poor Black child.” One can imagine how “radical” Tom Wolfe would have had endless fun ridiculing that.

“Hardscrabble Ivy League literarily deprived chic?”

Rating: unrated, scene of Hunter S. Thompson drug abuse, some profanity

Cast: Tom Wolfe, William F. Buckley, Jr. (archival interviews), Junior Johnson, Michael Lewis, Gail Sheehy, Gay Talese, Alexandra Wolf, Lynn Nesbit and the voice of Jon Hamm.

Credits: Directed by Richard Dewey, scripted by Michael Lewis, based on his magazine article. A Kino Lorber (Sept. 15) release.

Running time: 1:17