Fear and Loathing made wistful: Gibney's Gonzo a timid tribute to Thompson (the gentleman ordering up a round of vodka, eight-balls and ammo below)

It would clearly be unwise to expect a gonzo approach to a documentary about the daddy of gonzo journalism. Applying such flights of rambling conjecture, digression, lamentation and outright hallucination as were the benchmarks of Hunter S. Thompson’s distinctive prose to most non-fiction movies of any kind would be inadvisable—unless perhaps they were supplied by Thompson himself. Alas, Thompson’s been dead these three years, and his best work was a good three decades behind him in any case.

But you still have to wonder if the good doctor, a counterculture hero, a lefty with right wing tastes who once represented the very best spirit of Rolling Stone, a container of more drugs than Keith Richards, and author of such iconoclastic works of oddly eloquent political commentary as Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, doesn’t deserve a portrait more provocative, or at least more questioning in spirit than the one delivered by Alex Gibney, director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson may have no lack of great anecdotes and archival material to feed upon, not to mention a head-spinning array of new interviews with ex-wives and ex-US Presidents, but the liveliness of the subject matter and commentary it inspires can’t quite make up for what’s basically a safe, conventional delivery.

“He was my friend. He never paid his rent, broke up my marriage, and taught my children to smoke pot.” Now, if that’s not a tribute… It comes from Thomson’s neighbour and landlord, and it does, for the record, come with a nostalgic smile. Those who knew and loved Thompson tend to feel conflicted about the style of both Thompson’s life and his death, which came from the barrel of one of the author’s many guns one night in his kitchen in 2005, while his family relaxed in the next room. He always said he’d do it that way, and no one seemed too shocked, but it made you question the relationship between bravado and cowardice, an intersection lorded over by Hemingway. “We need his voice now more and than ever,” is something said several times in Gonzo, yet not as many times as admittances that the guy was on auto-pilot for ages, isolated, paranoid, all-too akin to his caricature in the Doonesbury comics, and getting drunk with the likes of Pat Buchanan for god's sake. As Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner puts it, in the end Thompson was “hostage to his own persona.”

Gonzo focuses, naturally, on the good years, the 60s and 70s, when like everybody Thompson went off his rocker and yet actually had some hope. He was handsome, daring, gainfully employed and listened to. He even advocated presidential candidates, invented drugs for their opponents to be addicted to, and ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. He legitimized fringe sensibilities in political discourse. But Gibney frames it all like a greatest hits package, replete with predictable, hokey-jokey use of period pop songs and insertions of deeply mannered readings of Thompson’s work by Johnny Depp, who for all his warm intentions just does not get the ribald tone at all.