Nobody captured insane 60s better than Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson

Before he’d even opened his mouth, everyone was already quite amused. He was playing to expectations, an actor doing a one-man performance of his own caricature. When he started to talk, you couldn’t understand a word of it. His voice was low, and he muttered into his shirt like a crazy man carrying on a conversation with his navel.

Nobody asked him to speak up, and nobody walked out. You were half-afraid he’d shoot you if you tried. But you also knew it was all part of his shtick. He was part Dr. Gonzo, part Doonesbury’s lunatic Uncle Duke. Thompson had indulged himself in drugs and guns and the dark side of the American dream for so long that he couldn’t escape the cartoon he’d made of himself.

But, as the new film “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” tells us, he did understand he was no longer the writer he’d once made himself.

Three years after Thompson picked up a gun and took his own life, the documentary arrived here the other day. It’s doing solid business at the new Landmark’s Harbor East Theater. It’s produced by Alex Gibney, whose past work, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” examined American torture practices in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

How big was Thompson in his day? Big enough that a couple of movies have been made about his writing and his mad life. Big enough that “Gonzo” is filled with the same admiring politicians who used to cringe every time Thompson aimed his pen at them. The pen was filled with cynicism. A cynic is a failed romantic, and Thompson was a romantic who loved his country and hated all the ways its leaders keep letting us down.

Thompson, “Gonzo” tells us, took his first literary cues from F. Scott Fitzgerald. As historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited some of Thompson’s stuff, tells us, “The whole deal in American life was rigged. Fitzgerald wanted to look through the window at it. Thompson wanted to smash the window.”

“Gonzo” takes us to an era — that freaky decade we call The Sixties that actually stretched from Dallas to the end of Vietnam — when windows of all kinds were being smashed. There’s the crowd at Haight-Ashbury. There’s Bobby Kennedy, there’s Richard Nixon, there’s the police riot at the ’68 Chicago convention as Janis Joplin wails, “Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.” For a moment, you forget Thompson long enough to remember the insanity, and feel your heart breaking all over again.

In a time of madness, the half-crazed Thompson seemed its most insightful recording secretary. “The most accurate, least factual” of all the political writers, Kennedy’s adviser, Frank Mankiewicz, half-joked about him.

He went after both parties. He called Hubert Humphrey “a gutless old ward healer.” He called Nixon “Mr. Hyde. He speaks to the werewolf in us on nights when the moon comes too close.”

But “Gonzo” captures Thompson’s comic sensibilities as well. He goes off “searching for the American dream.” Thompson and a pal pull up to a taco stand and tell the puzzled young lady at the takeout window, “We’re looking for the American dream. Do you know where we can find it?”

The young lady turns to ask the short-order cook with a cigarette dangling from his lip, “Hey, Luke, you know where the American dream is?” It prompts a helpful waitress in a bandana to ask, “Could that be the disco place?”

He was on his way to research “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” He was still at the top of his game. But he got so famous, and so notorious, that he lost the writer to the invented self. By the end, as he hit the lecture circuit, he was telling people, “They want to see Uncle Duke, I’ll give ’em Uncle Duke times 5.”

That was the guy who showed up at Hopkins. He was hiding behind the Wild Turkey and the drugs and guns. He knew that the myth had taken over. “Gonzo” gives us both the man and the myth, and a time when Thompson seemed to capture an insane era better than anyone alive.