(2008) You don't know where the edge is until you cross over it; and Dr Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) repeatedly changed lanes, going from optimism to disillusionment, the way he rode his motorcycle, helmetless through the darkness of the political landscape in search of the American dream.

"Trapped in Gonzo," according to author Tom Wolfe, "prisoner to his own fame," hostage to personality - having become a cartoon-strip character, Uncle Duke in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury - "I'm not sure who to be," he admitted, having lost the edge, run out of juice (in his yard at Woody Creek, Colorado, he blasted his typewriter) with his best writing behind him.

Director Alex Gibney's documentary of the journalist and author of Hells Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Breakdown on Paradise Ave., Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, among others, reveals a complex individualist through interviews with his friends, two wives, son, and admirers (please, filmmakers, identify people being interviewed more than once); his writings (narrated by Johnny Depp, who played his character in the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas); tape recordings; film clips and still photos.

Always pushing boundaries, unafraid of rocking the boat - "You were never reasonable," says his accomplice and illustrator Ralph Steadman - "an agonized human being," discloses his first wife Sondi Wright; he had two extremes, according to his second wife Anita Thompson, in that he could be "generous, beautiful" or "scary, mean, cruel," self-aware of both.

Son of a widowed librarian and sibling to two brothers in Louisville, Kentucky, he spent high-school graduation in jail. Moving to California, he infiltrated the Hells Angels in Oakland as a participatory journalist, portraying "Genghis Khan on an iron horse" for his breakout book, resulting in his appearance on To Tell the Truth. He wrote certain truths about human wrong-headedness.

With his tape recorder, he witnessed a gangbang, after which his rapport with the Angels began deteriorating until his association with them ended following their attacking antiwar demonstrators during which he received a beating as well. Former Hells Angel Sonny Barger offers an alternative view of the incident. Tom Wolfe used Thompson's tapes from his embedded reporting for writing The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Thompson admired F. Scott Fitzgerald's writings; he had a crush on Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane. He covered the "freak circus of the 60s," going to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago (his optimism waning after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy) in the midst of the tear gas and police brutality as a journalist (leaving an indelible mark on him), see beatings worse than anything he'd seen among the Hells Angels. He hated Humphrey and loathed Nixon.

Running for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colorado, on a platform favoring environmentalism and opposing ridiculous laws outlawing drugs, he shaved his head and raised his double-thumbed fist; of course, he lost.

Repeatedly missing deadlines ("teeth-grinding frenzy") but treasured as an enormous talent, he famously wrote articles for Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone. Wearing dark glasses and a bucket hat, clenching a cigarette holder in his teeth, high on drugs or alcohol, Dr Duke, the gonzo journalist (evil erupting from Steadman's drawings) raised his own head above the events of the Kentucky Derby to observe the crowd rather than the horses.

Sent to Las Vegas on assignment for Sports Illustrated to write a brief article about a motorcycle race, taking along attorney Oscar Acosta, Thompson produced a 60-page screed of their "savage journey" (rejected by the magazine, the tale grew into his best-known book and a feature film) - weird, imaginative, crazy, intelligent, outrageous, surreally psychedelic, over-the-top dramatics, LSD rages, shocking to squares.

Pat Buchanan found him to be "very funny" and "self-indulgent"; Gary Hart remarked that he "never trusted anybody who was elected," preferring "noble losers." Yet after he hammered the final nail in the coffin of the '60s, he expressed a "sense of inevitable victory over evil" with George McGovern's candidacy for president against the incumbent Richard Nixon ("cheap crook and war criminal"), composing Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ("most accurate, least factual" account of the 1972 presidential race) as a search for a politician willing to tell the painful truth.

As his creating a rumor of Democrat candidate Ed Muskie's addiction to ibogaine (a nonexistent drug) demonstrated, his political pieces were a hybrid of straight reporting and fantasy. Turning critical of his candidate after the fiasco of McGovern's VP choice, Senator Thomas Eagleton's admitting to electric-shock treatments, he nonetheless insisted that McGovern's stupid mistakes couldn't compare with Nixon's daily intentional criminal activities (the Watergate scandal was just emerging).

Disillusionment and despair setting in again, Thompson observed that Americans have "no qualms against killing anyone in the world who makes us feel uncomfortable." In Zaire, on assignment to cover the heavy-weight bout between Mohammad Ali (one of his heroes) and George Foreman, he missed one of the greatest boxing contests while spending the day in the hotel's swimming pool. Roused once more, inspired by hope, when he heard Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter's Law Day speech, in which the Georgian governor referred to Bob Dylan's song, "Maggie's Farm," Thompson endorsed Carter for president.

But his writing was in decline, his marriage with Sondi on the rocks after she'd discovered evidence of his many affairs, so he headed off to Florida, staying with songwriter Jimmy Buffett. George W. Bush's election/selection in 2000 may have been the final straw, according to those who knew him, followed by the response to 9/11, which he described as a "Christian jihad" with "merciless fanatics on both sides."

Courageous or cowardly, his suicide deprived the world of an unusual actor and commentator on its perversities. The final gunshot, Steadman noted, sounded from the next room like a book dropped.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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