Reviews: The Fear & Loathing of a 60s Era Counter-Culture Hero

Documentary "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" takes an in-depth look at the writer who attempted to rewrite the book on journalism.

Hunter S. Thompson, the inventor and almost sole practitioner of Gonzo journalism, was a troubled soul. This does not surprise those of us who came of age in Haight-Ashbury, Berkeley, Toronto's Rochdale, New York's East Village or any of the other hippie ghettos of the 1960s . All of our leaders, all of our heroes, from Lennon to Hoffman to Leary, were troubled souls.

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Drawing of Hunter Thompson by Ralph Steadman, who illustrated many of Thompson's books. Steadman also appears in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

These heroes and leaders, you see, were only mirroring the concerns of the street, where we were all troubled souls. We were troubled by war, racism, sexism, rampant materialism, an unbending status quo, LBJ, Nixon, the Chicago police, and draconian drug laws. We were troubled by the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, RFK, Martin Luther King, and four anti-war protesters at Kent State University. We were troubled because our freedoms were being taken away from us by the very people who were supposed to be protecting those freedoms.

It's easy to be troubled when you're surrounded by a world that's gone insane, and which considers it's insanity to be healthy and normal. If you don't believe this, just look around yourself right now.

Thompson's troubled nature, of course, is legendary, chronicled by countless Rolling Stone introductions and evident on the very surface of his writings . However, a look at Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson , a new documentary set to be released this week on DVD after having been well received at venues like the Sundance Festival, indicates that the myth of Thompson's bad-boy persona was much larger than the truth. Indeed, Thompson comes across more as a garden variety freak (the word us hippies used to describe ourselves) than as the sociopath conman Duke in the Doonesbury comic strip, which became his reputation.

Gonzo's writer and director, Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), doesn't set-out to set things straight on Thompson so much as to simply tell the writer's story. He manages this through the juxtaposition of archived footage with interviews with people who knew or were close to Thompson.

During the docupic's two hours, we see it all, beginning with Thompson's early work as an “embedded” member of the Hell's Angels, which includes an after-the-fact clip of Thompson appearing on the prime time game show To Tell the Truth. We see him hanging out with Grace Slick and the Airplane in San Francisco, circa 1967; getting embroiled in the police riot that was the Democratic National Convention in 1968; his legendary 1970 unsuccessful bid to be sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado; his unabashed support of George McGovern while covering the 1972 elections for Rolling Stone; and his discovery of Jimmy Carter a few years later.

The film documents the writing of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, inarguably Thompson's most well known work, by using scenes from the movie version starring Johnny Depp, who serves as this film's narrator. We are also treated to clips of interviews with everyone from George McGovern and Jimmy Carter to Sonny Barger of the Hell's Angels.

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Hunter Thompson bids an IBM Selectric a fond farewell.

Many from my generation, those of us who were really a part of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, Toronto's Rochdale, or New York's East Village scenes, will be impressed by this stroll down memory lane – not because it reinforces Thompson's larger-than-life reputation (it doesn't) but because it shows him as being very much like us. I imagine that most of us old freaks will see a lot of ourselves here, for his story is like our story. He was a card carrying member of Woodstock Nation, who experienced the promise of the Summer of Love as it withered and died on the vine, due to the influx of young aimless wannabe hippies who had no vision other than a yen for balling and drugs. He certainly shared our contempt for authority, and he believed that freedom was the greatest promise of the Constitution.

Although he didn't set-off to become a chronicler of the 60s counter-culture, no one did it better. Certainly not Tom Wolfe, also featured in this documentary, who did elect himself to be our spokesperson, as long as it was profitable. But Thompson was much more than just a crazy writer for crazy times. As Gibney's film reminds us, if not for Thompson, George McGovern might never have received the nomination for president, and the world outside of Georgia most likely would never have heard of Jimmy Carter.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson is highly recommend. Old boomers will find it to be an insightful trip through familiar territory. Those from younger generations will learn something of the unwritten history that got us to where we are today.

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