The Smartest
Guy at the Bar
by Chris Knipp

Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Alex Gibney's vivid, compelling depiction of the Sixties and Seventies superstar journalist, coming after the director's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side, clearly announces the emergence of one of the best documentary filmmakers we've got, and also one of the most prolific.

Gibney tells a very smart, very verbal, very funny, but also intensely significant story here. Some of the people who speak most highly of Thompson on camera are Billy Carter, George McGovern, and longtime Republican presidential adviser Pat Buchanan, as well as Gary Hart, writer Tom Wolfe, and Thompson's editors Jann Wenner and Douglas Brinkley at Rolling Stone, for which he did his best periodical pieces, the notable ones turned into books. More intimate details--but the man was such a perpetual performer that public and private are hard to separate--come from Thompson's first and second wives. And the English artist Ralph Steadman, who illustrated the writing, has much to say, as do plenty of others, including his son Juan. When Thompson first met Steadman he fed the Brit psilocybin, and he was never the same. Steadman became an invaluable cohort and collaborator, and his wild drawings provide a perfect visual counterpart to Thompson's written words on screen.

Thompson was a notorious wild man from early on. "I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me," he said. Prodigious in his consumption of drugs and alcohol, he was witness to some of the great events of his time, and got deeply involved in politics, opposition to the Vietnam War, and of course, the counterculture. Lean, athletic, flashily dressed, with trademark balding pate, big aviator sunglasses, cigarette holder and drink in hand, Thompson was a demon at the IBM Selectric, gleefully spinning out brilliant pieces nobody else could have written, a master of outrage and wit.

To describe these events, fueled by craziness, substances, and tongue-in-cheek joie de vivre, he devised his own outrageous style of writing in which cold clear fact was blended with wild invention and the adjectives and metaphors flew like hornets around a honey pot. Others too partook of the kind of journalism he practiced. The times--the flamboyant and boisterous and revolutionary Sixties and early Seventies-- seemed to call for a new, more violent, more committed language in journalism, a "New Journalism." Norman Mailer also wrote about the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, and on hand for Esquire were the likes of Jean Genet and William Burroughs. Three is something of Burroughs in Thompson, the drugs and the outrage and a way of seeing convention as conspiracy. One of Thompson's famous quotes gives a hint of the link: "America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

This was the moment when the distinction between fiction and non-fiction blurred: Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which used raw material from the more adventurous Thompson); Hell's Angels, Thompson's act of "embedded journalism," as Wolfe calls it; Truman Capote's true murder story In Cold Blood, done for The New Yorker; were all variations on the idea of the "non-fiction novel." The film might do a bit more to put Thompson in all this context, but it's clearly implied. He called his wild style "gonzo" journalism. In it the "reporter" is a central figure in his stories, with nothing hidden from view. To that he adds a mix of fact and drug-fueled fantasies that may terrify you and also may crack you up.

Thompson also wrote about Las Vegas as the American dream and about Nixon, whom he loathed. He used a tape recorder a lot: the spoken word fuels all his writings. Tapes provide great material for the film. So does Terry Gilliam's screen version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in it and became a great fan and friend, reads salient passages of Gonzo prose sitting in front of a well-stocked bar. Depp paid for the spectacular funeral for the writer that Thompson had--on film--planned out long before, in which his ashes were fired into the Colorado mountains from a canon mounted on a tower atop the Thompson symbol: a giant fist clutching a peyote button. Ralph Steadman did the sketches. This event is shown at the end of the film flaming bright against a dark blue velvet sky, and it provides a lovely and celebratory son et lumière finale.

Thompson's innate violence may explain how he could have blended in so well for a while with the Hell's Angels. He kept at least twenty firearms on hand in his house, all loaded, his first wife reports. He always planned to end his life with suicide, and he ended up shootng himself. He did it on a nice day in February, 2005, almost as a family event, with his son, daughter-in-law and grandson at the house and on the phone with his wife, a shot to the head, at the age of 68, not an act of depression but the completion of a careful plan. It was over. And he had been here to see George W. Bush and to accurately predict the decline and fall of the American empire. A late collection of short pieces is entitled Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.

Thompson was the maxed-out, maddened descendant of H.L. Mencken. His dissipation took its toll and so did fame. He fell into playing a self-parodying avatar of himself and his writing deteriorated after the later Seventies, so he had about ten good years and about twenty not-so-good ones. Some have dwelt on his decline; Gonzo doesn't. His writing faltered as early as 1974 when he went to Zaire with Steadman to cover the Foreman-Ali "Rumble in the Jungle," got drunk at the pool during the fight and never finished the story. Given how bright he burned and how hard he lived, it was inevitable that the man would burn out early. But the writing did not by any means fizzle out, even into the Nineties and beyond.

There is an immense wealth of spinoffs on film; Gibney had rich, rich material to work with here. Outrageous, hilarious, and brilliant, Thompson partied and rode with motorcycle gangs, ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, was a serious photographer, made a film Breakfast with Hunter, and such was his glamor and appeal that he understandably came to confuse himself with his legend and his literary persona.

The best that could happen is that this beautifully edited and greatly entertaining film makes a host of new converts to the writing. And doubtless that's one of its chief aims.

©2008 Chris Knipp
CineScene