Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson

(dir. Alex Gibney)

June 24, 2008

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Yes, he could be an open-throttle fount of political and social insight, and no other journalist, straight or bent, was as proficient at finding the oblique hook in a news story. But I’ve always felt the defining element of Hunter S. Thompson’s best writing was a humanism that simply refused to die, despite its being relentlessly pounded by what he termed the “5,000 pound shit hammer.” His drug-addled outrage hinged on a utopian desire for acceptance that was forever trampled by overseers (both elected and self-appointed) who acted like mere “swine,” “brutes,” and “jackals.” And he wasn’t shy about revealing their tawdry games to a populace that largely didn’t care who was screwing them, or why.

When he was hot, Thompson was King Kong clutching the Empire State Building, teeth bared and arms flailing. He knew he’d eventually get taken out, because that’s how the system operates, and the underlying sickness of this country, the horror that he obsessed over, is that you can’t really beat the system. But he was perpetually hell-bent to get loaded and swat a few biplanes before they nailed him.

Only Thompson would even think to describe Nixon aide Charles Colson’s testicles contracting into his body when he realizes the cover is being blown off the Watergate break-in. It isn’t poetry, or even journalism, if you’re getting technical. But it cuts to the heart of the matter in one outrageous, unshakable image. Thompson was one of the most adventurous writers of the past 40 years. Reading him can be a genuine trip.

Then again, he could also be sloppy, bordering on unhinged. And he liked to veer off on rambling, multi-paragraph tangents, then get back to the matter at hand with a simple “anyway.” But that was part of his charm. He knew full-well what he was doing, even when there was a good chance he didn’t know where he was. A typewriter-lugging Don Quixote who entered the rumble on coke, speed, and mescaline, his windmill was the status quo, and he attacked it with extraordinary zeal. When he was working for “Rolling Stone” magazine in the early 1970s, there was simply no other writer like him. As time passed, his synapses sparked down to nothing, and his gift for red-line metaphors failed him badly. But for about 10 or 11 years there, he was one absolutely hellacious writer.

Hunter S. Thompson was his own genre. He was Gonzo. And when he realized he couldn’t do it anymore, that he had simply lost the capacity to fight the good fight, he selected a shotgun from his vast collection of firearms, walked in the kitchen of his “fortified compound” in Colorado, and shot himself in the head.

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Alex Gibney’s “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” is a ferociously entertaining documentary that doesn’t shy away from the fact that the good doctor was often a straight-up asshole, and eventually lost his Mojo altogether. It does, however, tend to ignore how dangerous he could be to innocent people who got in his way.

I don’t mean the those who were closest to him; it’s made abundantly clear that he could be both affectionate and an absolute beast toward them. I mean the poor bastards who had to drive next to him on the highway, or get in an elevator with him, when he was out of his mind on some mixture of booze and the local pharmacy. Gibney’s film is one king-hell of a “don’t try this at home” story, but much of it, just like Thompson’s writing, is deeply moving, and very, very funny.

Gibney has every reason to fly over the top with his visuals, but he handles the material with commendable restraint. You get talking heads like Jann Wenner, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, and a bevy of Thompson’s lesser-known friends and relatives, interspersed with amusing TV appearances by Thompson, and footage of such ground-shaking events as the ’68 Chicago riots and the fall of the Nixon White House. (Johnny Depp - who memorably portrays Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s vastly underrated screen adaptation of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” - reads passages from Thompson throughout the movie, and does a nice job of it, too.)

Thompson collapsed into periodic banshee screams while covering many of the key events of the Vietnam era, but he did it while standing up for so-called “freaks” who, at the very least, knew not to follow the tight-assed frauds who had been elected as America’s “leaders.” This worked in his favor a lot of the time, but could also lead to things like getting beaten to a bloody pulp by a phalanx of Hell’s Angels.


As Wolfe points out, in 1965 Thompson was actually “imbedded” with the Angels - he bought a bike and rode with them for a year - while researching what would become his first great book, “Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.” “Imbedding” is an utterly apt description, of Thompson’s modus operandi. Throughout his career, he’d bury himself in his subject matter, then report from deep within both the story itself and his own jabbering psyche. Gibney, by the way, includes “Hell’s Angels”’ most harrowing passage— a horrifying gang-rape that Thompson witnesses at an Angels’ “party.” It’s not for the faint of heart, but Thompson’s mixture of cold journalism and moral devastation matches anything Truman Capote cooked up for “In Cold Blood.” Again, at his best, this guy was a magnificent writer.

But, after making an ill-fated run to become the Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado (he nearly made it, too, scaring the holy bejeebies out of Aspen-dwellers who still believed in good, old-fashioned Law and Order) Thompson would abandon the relatively traditional reportage of “Hell’s Angels” for a manic, baying-at-the-moon odyssey that carried him through the marble hallways and seedy alleyways of the American landscape.

Most casual fans are familiar with the searing, pitch-black comic novella, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” But the film makes it clear that that particular dose of fear and loathing is simply Thompson’s most blatantly psychedelic, best-known work. There was a lot more going on in the long run than hallucinated bats swooping down at his swerving convertible.

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“Fear and Loathing” is a masterpiece of sorts, a twisted, acid-fried journey deep into the single craziest place in the single craziest country on the planet. Here, Gibney effectively employs Gilliam’s film, including one CGI-driven clip of whooping gamblers making a slow transformation into blood-drinking, rump-humping lizards.

“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is a fireworks display going off in Thompson’s head, but its depth arises from the fact that the Roman candles eventually transform themselves into warning flares. Thompson felt the full weight of the post-Sixties crash not long after the Rolling Stones started crying for shelter, and he rode the same wave of dread that darkened Altamont. He was just a lot funnier than the Stones were while he surfed it.

I’ve long considered Thompson’s crowning achievement to be “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ’72,” in which he hops the press bus and follows George McGovern while he attempts to wrest the Presidential crown away from one Richard M. Nixon. Rather surprisingly, Gibney spends more time on this stage of Thompson’s life than on any of the others, and the details - including many that are laid out for us by McGovern and his then campaign manager, Gary Hart – are a blast to hear.


There’s never been a better book written on the American electoral process than “Campaign Trail,” but you have to stay on your toes when you read it. Even Thompson was surprised that people believed him when he wandered rather fantastically into a theory that Democratic frontrunner Edmund Muskie was addicted to a powerful tribal hallucinogen called Ibogaine.

One of the funnier clips in “Gonzo” is Thompson nonchalantly explaining on a talk show that he knew for certain the heinous rumor started when Muskie’s campaign hit Miami, because he was the one who started it. But don’t let that keep you away from the book. It’s down and dirty stuff, told from the point of view of a political junkie who had already seen too much, but couldn’t make himself look away.

Nixon wins, by the way.

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Gibney plays up the parallels between the troubled times Thompson was covering and the current-day situation here in America, to compelling effect. This concept isn’t tacked on as an afterthought to simply shape the movie. It’s a central aspect of “Gonzo”’s narrative, one that you’ll likely splash with the hot sauce of your own feelings about Emperor Bush and his Iraq fiasco.

One of the more astonishing things in the movie is the opening sequence, in which Thompson dumps the football story he was working on for ESPN.com and writes about the hijacked passenger planes that just took down the World Trade Center. His impressions of exactly where this heinous act would lead us are eerily precise, and illustrates just how perceptive he really was, even when he was well past his prime.


Four years later, Thompson would take himself out of the game for good, but passages like that make you wonder what he could have accomplished if he hadn’t burned himself out on the road to pseudo-freedom.

The sad truth of the matter is that we need someone like Hunter S. Thompson now as much as we ever have. As he made abundantly clear, through language that virtually crackled on the page, the swine and jackals will forever be circling for fresh carcasses. They’ll forever be circling for you and me.

Believe it or not, ”Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson” contains drug use, bad language, violence, and nudity. There’s also a fantastic soundtrack by such iconic bell-ringers as Dylan, the Stones, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Those tunes don’t come cheap, folks, and documentaries seldom make any money. So it seems likely that the musicians cut their rates to be involved in a film about someone they respected. Rated R. 120 minutes. (The movie will be released on July 3rd.)

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