“Why shouldn’t a writer be a rock star?” someone asks in Gonzo: The Life & Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the new documentary about the raging iconoclast whose writing and unhinged behavior drew as many fans as it repulsed. Few journalists have attained the notoriety of Hunter S. Thompson and few films have captured a vibrant, three-dimensional life like Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney’s. Gonzo is for both those already touched by Thompson’s scintillating writing and those unaware of his iconic status — a film both moving and disarming.
Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in his Aspen home in 2005 with one of his favorite guns. Disheartened by what he saw as the Bush Administration’s butchering of the country and the decline of his formidable powers, Thompson decided to remove himself from the equation. Gibney’s camera careens through the mischievous miscreant’s house, left untouched since his death just as parents keep the memory of a lost child alive by leaving their room just as it was. The camera hovers over memorabilia that acts as magical amulets to transport the viewer back to a time and place when Thompson solidified his position in history as one of this country’s most influential writers and intellectual hellraisers.
Gonzo touches on the major milestones in Thompson’s life: his intense and disorienting relationship with the motorcycle gang Hell’s Angels, his nearly successful political bid for the sheriff’s office in Aspen in 1970, the infamous stew of circumstances that made “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” possible, the Chicago Democratic Convention (“the American Dream clubbing itself to death”), and his idealistic and ultimately disillusioned participation in Senator George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.
Throughout it all, Thompson recorded what he saw in a heady, participatory journalism that would come to be known as “gonzo,” an entirely new form of reporting that would turn the industry inside out. Whether he was impaling the world’s sacred cows or causing mischief for mischief’s sake, Thompson’s words were eerily prophetic.
Gonzo includes clips of never-before-seen and heard home movies and audiotapes, and passages from Thompson’s many manuscripts, narrated by actor Johnny Depp. Gibney also interviews a broad spectrum of Thompson’s peers, from senators and ex-presidents to political pundits, novelists and old-time hellraisers.
A slave of his own persona, Thompson became a caricature of himself in later life. With a personality at once seductive and vicious, he embodied Whitman’s wildly discordant contradictions, dared to take on the establishment while staying true to his convictions, and intentionally chose to see the world though a perpetual drug and booze-induced haze. As abrasive as Thompson was, one realizes, watching this time capsule to his legacy, that we need men like him now more than ever.
The larger-than-life icon, as much a national treasure as a cultural gadfly in the public ointment, was an unlikely purveyor of truth. It’s nice to be reminded, as Shakespeare taught us, that truth comes from the most unexpected places, even the booze-reeking mouths of madmen.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.