Early success is routinely reckoned as a cause of the drying up and demise of American artists. However, fame -- with not all that much fortune -- isn’t posited as the downfall of the New Journalist subject of Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. While the title alternatively inserts “Dr.” before the man’s name, nowhere is “the good doctor” explained. Nor, in fact, does this hagiography go deeply into the Louisville origins, the 1965-75 flowering, or the subsequent decline and unsurprising 2005 gunshot suicide of the controversial writer. 

With interviews, period music, archival footage, home movies and stills, plus clips from films like Terry Gilliam’s awful name-stuffed adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, added to previously unreleased audiotapes, letters, manuscript material and Ralph Steadman artwork, the director/co-producer’s uncritical “screen story” is threaded together by narrated words “from the typewriters of Thompson himself.” As Raoul Duke-slash-Thompson FLinLV featured fan Johnny Depp, who would later pay for the Outlaw Journalist’s rocket-launched funeral spectacular and who here narrates and for no reason appears from time to time to dangle a conspicuous revolver and read directly from the books in front of a well-stocked bar.

Naysayers are hardly extended equal time, although many frames are given over to heavies Nixon, Humphrey and Muskie, and to Vietnam. Tears are not shed over the subject’s fate, not by son Juan or sympathetic ex-wife Sandy or widow Anita, even if Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner gets husky-voiced and “can’t talk on.” Sonny Barger may call him “a jerk in my eyes [but] a good writer” -- Hell’s Angels was priceless PR for that leader’s Oakland chapter -- but longtime associate Steadman, friends such as patient landlord George Stranahan, and pop-prose writer/journalist Tom Wolfe are on the bandwagon for the man’s iconoclastic insight and style, so smitten that they do not go beyond surface analysis.

Thompson’s acerbic, manic, often obscene observations of the American Dream and its politics are, or should have been, near the heart of the documentary. Admitting to starting out “naively enthusiastic . . . like a first hit of orange sunshine,” and boasting of ingesting tons of “Congolese hallucinogen Ibogaine” -- another Thompson fabrication -- Gibney “can’t say what it was that I directed in the film.” Hence the problem, for the resultant collage cannot stand back and assess its own adolescent hippie awe of Flower Power San Francisco and Woody Creek, Colorado, of drugs and alcohol and of deliberate shock effect in the “cool” hero who confronts “square” hypocrisy.

Like Kerouac and Kesey, Thompson had contradiction issues, but unlike Beat forerunner Walt Whitman’s universal Self -- “Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” -- he was unable to reconcile or accept them. Like Norman Mailer, he wanted to “translate his life into a literary career,” but the “mockery, rage and despair” worn on the sleeve of this involved observer grew tiresome.

Congenitally behind on deadlines, he grew to rely on aural-recording of his pieces. “You go with your instincts,” but things worked out less frequently as, he bemoaned, his own presence and personality become the cynosure and thus altered events he was to cover. Fact, interpretation, wishful thinking, and out-and-out invention mingled so freely as to become inseparable, and Hunter lost joy in himself as individual and as writer. Some few later essays are praised by others, but the confusion, or disillusion, had begun as early as the 1972 “Campaign Bloat” of McGovern’s fatal Eagleton error. Two years later it was set in stone in Kinshasa, where Thompson dog-paddled a pool in a Nixon mask while nearby assignments Ali and Foreman rumbled in the jungle.

The author tired and trapped inside his image and notoriety, the writing turned largely irrelevant, even as the myth attracted groupies and hangers-on who were more than the family would put up with. The later years and end are rather rushed in the film, and the opportunity is not seized to relate Thompson’s erratic but prescient sociopolitical X-ray vision to current public cynicism. Neither author nor film develops, so what you see from the very beginning is what you get. Similar to the recent Chicago 10, Gonzo banks on an easy adolescent delight in seeing the debunking of the powers that be, but, like Thompson’s own run for office, that is of no help in the final tally. The bang-bang mannerisms cloy as quickly on-screen as does the macho ego-posturing on the prose page. 

(Released by Magnolia Pictures and rated "R" for drug and sexual content, language and some nudity.)