Film

For a journalist, Hunter S. Thompson sure had a lot of guns: 22 of them by his ex-wife’s recollection in Alex Gibney’s seasoned, evenhanded profile. And that will always be the dominant image of him, wiry and wired, a loon behind his shades, squatting on his Aspen, Colorado, compound shooting at things. Gibney uses much of this footage, as well as an eerie montage of Thompson taking aim at a rider on a motorbike wearing a rubber Nixon mask. Turns out it’s the gonzo writer himself, and there can’t be a better, more suggestive moment: Thompson needed his nemesis both to flourish and to self-destruct.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is a valuable reclamation of the political from the personal. Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp (Gibney’s enjoyably sober narrator) turned Thompson into a borderline clown for 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; this documentary restores a fair measure of the intelligent (even feared) critic and author, here remembered by Nixon adviser Pat Buchanan, boss Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, and Jimmy Carter and George McGovern. They all smile, recalling the sparrer and serious talent, invariably dubbed a “romantic,” let down by elections and his own hopes for change.

The film is smart enough to create an arresting swirl of late-’60s media hyperbole: Hells Angels, Vietnam bombings and Nixon’s robotic grinning. It makes sense that a writer would emerge from it all ready to play his own dirty tricks. But where is the clampdown on that culture? Thompson spent much of the ’80s and ’90s out of touch; how could Gibney not try to explain the thrown-off prophet? Still, this is valuable stuff—a reminder of tactics our press has forgotten.