It’s altogether fitting that a documentary about writer Hunter S. Thompson be released on Independence Day.
The late Mr. Thompson, who died in 2005 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound that he all but publicly scheduled, personified several strands of the classic American mythos: He loved guns and road tripping. He lived in a cabin out West.
In his heyday, he semi-seriously ran for mayor of Aspen, Colo., which looked a lot more like a frontier town than the Learjet magnet it is today.
“Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” was wrapped at the same time as filmmaker Alex Gibney’s last effort, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” an Oscar-winning documentary about the Bush administration’s controversial techniques for interrogating terrorist suspects.
Not coincidentally, “Gonzo” is overly pushy with Nixon-Bush and Vietnam-Iraq parallels, but if today’s antiwar left were more like Hunter S. Thompson, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a drearily sententious lot.
“Gonzo” failed to persuade me that things are as bad today as they were then, but it didn’t have to. The film, rich in archival video and audio footage, is much more interested in “then” - specifically, the period of 1965-75, when Mr. Thompson was at his finest.
One of Mr. Thompson’s contemporary admirers, Tom Wolfe, once likened America to a “billion-footed beast.” For those 10 years, there were few more adept stalkers of said beast than the Louisville, Ky.-born Mr. Thompson, who followed its movements and mutations into such places as Las Vegas, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and on the road with biker gang the Hell’s Angels.
Along with journalists like Mr. Wolfe and Gay Talese, Mr. Thompson cracked open the possibilities of narrative nonfiction. “I survived by making literature out of what might otherwise be seen as craziness,” he told an interviewer in 1997.
Mr. Thompson’s “gonzo” style is not to be confused with “new journalism,” the long-form art associated with Mr. Wolfe and the New York magazine of the recently deceased editor Clay Felker. What set it apart was Mr. Thompson himself. He blurred the lines of fiction and nonfiction in his writing as well as his life. His greatest “character” was himself - a self-styled outlaw with two dozen firearms and a fax machine. Mr. Thompson was fluent in the dark side of the American drama because he nursed it in his own psyche.
On this score, “Gonzo” is enthusiastic without being hagiographic. Its most poignant interview subject is Mr. Thompson’s first wife, Sandy, who is frank about Mr. Thompson’s excesses (alcohol, drugs, guns, womanizing) and, ultimately, his wasted potential as a critical voice in America.
Mr. Gibney even gives generous, and amusing, airtime to Pat Buchanan, who served as an aide to President Richard Nixon - the object of Mr. Thompson’s most painstakingly cultivated hatred.
The narration of Johnny Depp (star of a Hollywood treatment of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”), along with some humble computer graphics imagery re-creations of Mr. Thompson’s free-associative hallucinations, are a welcome counterbalance to the earnest reminiscences of folks like Gary Hart, who managed Sen. George McGovern’s ill-fated campaign against Mr. Nixon in ’72; and former President Jimmy Carter, mirthless as ever.
Then there’s Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone magazine publisher turned media lord who gave Mr. Thompson his widest forum (not to mention outrageous expense accounts).
At one point, Mr. Wenner chokes up at the memory of Mr. Thompson, when he should have wept over the corporatized rag he’s made of the once truly countercultural Rolling Stone.
Hunter S. Thompson’s is not the only decline and death limned in “Gonzo.”
From “Fear and Loathing” to Us Weekly: It sounds like one of Mr. Thompson’s most disturbing psychotic visions.
…
“Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson”
(R: Drug and sexual content; profanity; some nudity)
Directed by Alex Gibney. Screen story by Mr. Gibney. Narrated by Johnny Depp.
119 minutes.
www.huntersthompsonmovie.com
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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