"America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
Hunter S. Thompson was many things: dangerous both in person and in print, hilarious, unhinged, a brilliant, scathing journalist. He was also gun-obsessed and in constant possession of a teeming glass of Wild Turkey, if not volatile drugs by the stashload or both. The Alex Gibney documentary in question attempts to distil the great man's potency into 92 minutes of measured mayhem, and whilst it couldn't really begin to chart his excoriating journey in any great detail, it does a decent job of providing us with a glimpse of the turbulent savagery Hunter S Thompson both gleefully perpetuated and bore bemused witness to.
We start with the first real 'in' for Thompson - his catalogue of the brutal and rampantly iconic Hell's Angels. Spending a year with these vicious, unbridled wanderers no doubt had the pull of sick infamy about it at the outset, but it's re-emphasised here that the trouncing ('stomping', as the Hell's Angels themselves rejoiced) he got at the culmination of this period for 'misrepresentation' crystallised his ill-feeling about the whole project. The book, though, hit the bestseller lists (Thompson considered it a failure) and things were rolling in earnest for the man that would normally yammer out his copy whilst tonked on all manner of illegal substances.
He would go on to write disdainfully of the hippie culture, which he considered to be an indolently selfish and artificial means to an end, and ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado (narrowly losing), at one point turning up at the Rolling Stone headquarters with a six-pack of beer and a demand that the magazine publisher, Jann Wenner, put out Thompson's account of the election. Wenner would later commission the hallucinogenic, American Dream battering Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas on the basis of '20 jangled pages' of drug-fuelled madness and paranoia. The same benevolence would fund a trip to the 'Rumble In The Jungle' which Thompson missed, choosing instead to swim around naked save for a Nixon mask, out of his mind on a ridiculous combination of narcotics, and the brilliant, splenetic burst of horrified invective that is Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72. (That masterful political tome brought, amongst other things, the little-known drug Ibogaine into the mass-consciousness, as part of one of Thompson's many character assassinations had Hubert Humphrey's running mate, Ed Muskie, zonked on the drug from dusk 'til dawn. Not true of course, but the damage was done and Muskie's demise was accelerated.) Nixon was reviled to the point of seething inability to talk about the man beyond the printed page, although we do get a brief recollection of a lengthy car journey during which all that was discussed was American Football. Probably for the best.
The documentary can only do so many things with such scant time, and as a big Thompson fan I would've appreciated a bit more of a 'delve'; why did he drink such a prodigious quantity of booze and take drugs in the kind of quantities that could've killed a herd of buffalo? Was it, as I might suggest, due to a crippling deficit in his social-skills and a surprising lack of confidence (Terry Gilliam, director of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, wasn't particularly enamoured of Thompson, at one point saying, 'As soon as he gets out in public he seems to be determined to act like an idiot.')? Why did it take so long for the great 'Rum Diary' to see the light of day? The film instead fizzes along in scattershot fashion, going for broad sweeps as opposed to searing insight, and whilst it's fun enough, it's no home run.
So, we get a brief look at the man in hurtling 'career' rundown, narrated by a clearly smitten Johnny Depp, and we end with the fitting blast of Thompson's ashes into the Aspen night sky. What might Thompson make of now? I'd suggest that he jumped ship at exactly the right point: as he knew himself, these were times too savage even for him.
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