Gonzo goes over the edge

In theaters Friday: Imagine That, Moon [limited release], The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Tetro [limited release]

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Gran Torino, The International

Being a journalist, there is a solid amount of film dedicated to my craft. Mind you, not as much as cops or doctors or the collective armed forces get, but still, no complaints. State of Play I thought was well worth sitting through, and if you missed it, you can read my review here. But there is one figurehead of journalism that towers over the rest in his ability to be translated into on screen entertainment. With his unbelievable antics, cavalier style, and sharp-tongued declarations on America’s ideology and its iconoclasts, no one shines and shatters on screen quite like one Hunter Thompson.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the latest and best testament documenting one of the 20th century’s most noteworthy characters, a journalist provocateur and guru for the underground and outcast truth-seekers from the forgotten fringes to the klieg-lit pits of national politics. Narrated by Johnny Depp, who portrayed Thompson so surreal in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the documentary features insight and recollection from the late writer’s contemporaries, critics and friends including author Douglas Brinkley, politico Pat Buchanan, President Jimmy Carter, 1972 candidate George McGovern and Rolling Stone founder Jan Wenner among others.

Throughout, Thompson is portrayed as a flawed visionary of enormous talent and importance, but equally large addictions, depression and personal failures. Another, darker drama could be made of Thompson’s personal life, but thankfully Gonzo zeroes in on his career. And what an adventure it was. Thompson made his name by riding with the Hell’s Angels for a year in the mid-1960s. He lived to tell about it, and the book was a hit. Soon after he ran for sheriff of Aspen — and narrowly lost — a campaign that made him a regular contributor to Rolling Stone.

Thompson subtitled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a “savage journey into the heart of the American Dream.” His sports feature on the Kentucky Derby calling the whole enterprise “decadent and depraved” included the byline: written under duress by Hunter S. Thompson. In 1972, Wenner sent Thompson to Washington, D.C., for a year to cover the presidential race. No one in the beltway knew who Thompson was, but once the music and culture magazine started publishing his dispatches, everyone took notice. No one had written about politics with Thompson’s unrepentantly honest yet wildly imaginative and emotional prose. No one had gone gonzo on Washington before Thompson landed in 1972, and really, few have done it that well since.

From the rise of the hippies and the freaks in the 1960s, the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King Jr., man on the moon, Watergate and rock-n-roll, Thompson was there feasting on the wreckage, and his work is a one-of-a-kind response to modern America.

“The edge; there’s no honest way to explain it,” Thompson writes and Depp recites in Gonzo. “Because the only people who know where it is have gone over.” After riding it too long, maybe longer than anyone else could, Thompson himself went over the edge and took his own life in 2005. A tragically unpoetic end to a tragically poetic figure. The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved — widely considered the Thompson’s birthplace of gonzo journalism — ends with an anagnorisis, a Greek dramatic term for a character discovering his true identity toward the end of a play. While reporting on the derby’s too-drunken, too-rich, too-snobbish revelers, Thompson and illustrator Ralph Steadman spent three days of drinking and debauchery. In no time, Thompson realized, he had become just like those he had set out to caricature.