Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (***1/4)

The title seems entirely too formal for a movie about a guy who made his name by hanging out with and writing about Hell’s Angels, who had his ashes shot out of a fireworks cannon out, and who, besides reinventing journalism, was best known for his fondness for guns and ability to consume prodigious quantities of alcohol. Other mind-altering substances figure into Thompson’s story. He nearly won a sheriff’s race on a pro-drug platform in his adopted home of Colorado. His reference to Edmund Muskie’s imagined addiction to ibogaine helped derail the senator’s 1972 presidential campaign. His semi-fictionalized road-trip memoir Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas amply catalogues his pharmaceutical adventures along with his take on where the American dream had ended up.

Johnny Depp, the star of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film version , narrates this strange man’s life, which ended with his suicide in February 2005. The latter part of the movie is the story of an inevitable decline—while the 1960s and ’70s Thompson created gonzo journalism, the blend of fact, surreality, and opinion that was the antithesis of objectivity, by the Reagan era he had become a man trying too hard to live up to his own image. Still, he wrote prescient commentary on the aftermath of 9/11 as well as a blog for ESPN, and even that last, self-inflicted gunshot can be seen as the man going out on his own terms. Telling his story are usual countercultural suspects like Tom Wolfe and Jann Wenner, whose magazine, Rolling Stone, provided Hunter Thompson’s best-known literary home; political folks like Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, and George McGovern; and friends and family, notably his two wives. It is to Thompson’s credit that his ex seems to recall him mostly fondly, despite his volatile personality and womanizing. McGovern is the effective hero of the 1972 presidential-race account Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. As for Buchanan, I’m no fan of his politics, but you have to like a guy who can recall a political enemy with such apparent nostalgia. (Buchanan’s old boss, Richard Nixon, was Thompson’s foremost object of Loathing.)

Gibney, who shot this simultaneously with his Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, adopts some of Thompson’s visual style, putting quasi-psychedelic visuals behind his talking heads and incorporating footage of Thompson from earlier documentaries as well as clips of Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and 1980’s Where the Buffalo Roam, in Bill Murray played Thompson. Gibney may not have the identifiable style of an Errol Morris, or the populist flair of a Michael Moore, who among filmmakers might be best be called “gonzo,” but he has made some of the most information-packed, incisive documentaries of the last few years, including Who Killed the Electric Car? and Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room. You probably should have some interest in the 1960s counterculture, American political history, or journalism to enjoy this movie. But if so, it’s a worthwhile portrait of a man who helped change the way we look at all three.

IMDB link

viewed 6/30/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 7/10/08