Home > Chicago Movies > Movie Review > Movie review: 'Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson'

3 stars (out of four)

In a telling clip toward the end of Alex Gibney’s biopic “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” a young Thompson explains that his myth has outgrown him, and that he, as a real, living human being, is standing in its way. “It’d be much better if I died,” he says, with no particular rancor. “Then people could take the myth and make films.”

And so Gibney has. “Gonzo” is more about the myth than the man; in spite of interviews with his wife, his ex-wife, his son, Juan, and his longtime artistic partner Ralph Steadman, plus intimate home videos and audio recordings, the film has more breadth than depth. In laying out a history of Thompson’s work and his legacy, it leans heavily on his “gonzo” image, the hard-boozing, hard-drugging, larger-than-life persona that dominated his writing, and sometimes outshone it.

As with previous documentaries such as “Enron: The Smartest Guys  in  the Room” and “Taxi  to  the Dark Side,” writer-director Gibney offers up a sleekly entertaining, dynamic collage of sources. Thompson friend Johnny Depp narrates and reads excerpts from the author’s writing. Interviewees  such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan, George McGovern and Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner discuss Thompson’s history and his impact on the social and political scene of the ’60s and ’70s. Where Gibney can’t find illustrative stock footage, home videos or TV clips, he re-creates scenes from Thompson’s life with actors, or uses clips of Depp as Thompson in  the film version of “Fear  and Loathing  in Las Vegas,” or Bill Murray as Thompson in “Where  the Buffalo Roam.”

The bright tapestry he weaves lays out a timeline of Thompson’s writing and provides plenty of samples of it, but it doesn’t do much to get below Thompson’s prickly surface—which is a particular problem, since the film frequently acknowledges how much of that surface was pretense, an attempt to live up to a reputation that Thompson sometimes considered a trap.

Early on, biographer Douglas Brinkley offers what he considers the formative experience of Thompson’s life: Growing up poor in Louisville,   Thompson befriended the town’s privileged kids  and ran around raising hell with them. But when they were all arrested after a night of drinking, “the rich kids who knew the judges got out. Hunter never got to walk for graduation; he was in jail.” Brinkley considers that the point at which Thompson’s outsider status and his fury at the establishment was permanently sealed.

“Gonzo” could use more such insight. It’s accessible, entertaining and hugely kinetic, packed with memorable songs from Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and many more icons of Thompson’s era. Like all of Gibney’s work, it’s informative and a little titillating, just sensationalistic enough to grab a broader audience than the subject alone might warrant. And it’s a fine portrait for neophytes looking for a first overview of Thompson’s life, work  and eventual well-telegraphed suicide. But like Thompson’s work itself, it sometimes feels like a smoke screen, a colorful but distracting, distracted set of pretenses hiding as much as they reveal.

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