Going, going, Gonzo

Americans revel in the cult of personality. And Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson (he purchased the famous appellation for $10 from the Universal Life Church in the late 1960s), as both co-creator and carrier of the ’60s zeitgeist, embodied personality writ large. The anarchist, iconoclast, maverick, drug- and drink-induced seer of all that was most corroded and crumbling, most loathing and lethal, in American culture and its political system, finds a fresh, albeit sadly posthumous, platform in Alex Gibney’s less than definitive, but still substantial, entrée into the personal life and writings of the legendary “outlaw,” whose literary feats were often overshadowed by his outrageous antics.

The film includes clips of never-before-seen or -heard home movies and audiotapes, as well as passages from unpublished manuscripts read by Johnny Depp, who portrayed the good doctor in all his “bad craziness” in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It also benefits from a number of well-integrated interviews with Thompson’s contemporaries: Tom Wolfe, Ralph Steadman, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, Jann Wenner and Jimmy Buffet. But the doc suffers from an overuse of Fear and Loathing segments and a feel (too) good amalgam of ’60s music. But gonzo boomers who lived through the period, gonzo wannabes and the gonzo curious will fill theatrical screenings and brand the DVD an evergreen.

As the progenitor of gonzo—a new style of journalism favoring the journalist’s first-person subjective stream-of-consciousness, humorous sarcasm, exaggeration, verbatim quotations, an emphasis of style over accuracy and eschewing of rewrites—Thompson’s unorthodox meanderings into the cultural milieu, courtesy of Rolling Stone (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream), engagingly illustrated his personal philosophy: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

Gibney has an already-impressive body of work. He directed this year’s Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, an examination of the death of an Afghani taxi driver at Bagram Air Base, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a scathing indictment of corporate corruption. And he produced No End in Sight, about the Iraq debacle, directed by Charles Ferguson, and Eugene Jarecki’s The Trials of Henry Kissinger.

Given this director’s own political leanings, it’s no surprise that he chose to focus on Thompson’s most politically active and artistically fruitful period between 1965-1975, especially his coverage of hippies, Hell’s Angels and Hanoi, along with the ’72 presidential election. Referring to the latter, George McGovern’s campaign director Frank Mankiewicz described Thompson’s as “the most accurate, and least factual, account of the campaign”).

In fact, it is Thompson’s consciousness of, and involvement in, the moral issues of his times, especially the Vietnam War, which anchors the film’s narrative through line and counterpoints it (if a little heavy-handedly) with the 21st-century dilemma we call “the War in Iraq.”

It’s enlivening to watch Thompson at his zenith in this glorified scrapbook of a film—Pat Buchanan remembers him as “a half-crazed Davy Crockett, running around Richard Nixon’s Alamo”—and, concurrently, disheartening to watch his creative demise and personal destruction. The man who had served as a kind of raunchy Delphic oracle in his heyday, observed the scene and “signs” just as presciently and excruciatingly, in his final years: “If Bush wins,” he warned in 2003, “the planet is doomed.”

Hunter S. Thompson was the best and the worst thing inside the ’60s time capsule he helped create. He outlived the decade, however, and then his myth outlived him. During a period in which journalism could be considered at an all-time low, we could use a little gonzo-vision about now.

No doubt, Thompson, the quintessential independent and the man who concluded that, “the American Dream really is f--ked,” would appreciate the irony that Gonzo opens on July 4.

Doctor’s orders: “Buy the ticket, take the ride” with Gonzo.

Distributor: Magnolia
Cast: Johnny Depp, Douglas Brinkley, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, Tom Wolfe, Ralph Steadman and Jann Wenner
Director/Screenwriter: Alex Gibney
Producers: Graydon Carter, Roy Ackerman, Mark Cuban, Salimah El-Amin and Alison Ellwood
Genre: Documentary
Rating: R for drug and sexual content, language and some nudity
Running time: 118 min.
Release date: July 4