Buy the Ticket Take the Ride

Product description Hunter S. Thompson didn t write stories he lived them. This documentary about a life that was often out of control and always interesting captures Thompson s spirit through stories told by some of the outlaw celebrities he inspired. Nick Nolte Johnny Depp and Sean Penn are among the voices who piece together the biography of the man who put Gonzo Journalism on the map. Amazon.com It won't come as much of a surprise to anyone familiar with Hunter S. Thompson to learn that his life and work were inseparable, even indistinguishable, but that's the principal revelation in director Tom Thurman's Thompson documentary, Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. In the 1960s and '70s, Thompson created what he called "gonzo journalism," mixing truth and fiction in a kind of superheated prose in which the writer, more often than not fueled by his copious intake of drugs and alcohol, not only reported stories but made himself an integral part of them. When he took his own life in 2005 at the age of 67, he left behind lots of bemused friends, peers, and collaborators, many of whom are on hand here. Johnny Depp, who portrayed Thompson in the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his most famous work, describes him as a man "capable of a verbal menace? I've seen people reduced to mist in a matter of seconds." Actor John Cusack calls him "a deeply serious, deeply moral person? who loved orgies," and author Tom Wolfe says Thompson was "(the 20th) century's greatest comic writer in the English language." There are also clips from both Fear and Loathing and Where the Buffalo Roam (with Bill Murray as Thompson). But while Thompson himself appears in several interview bits (there are brief excerpts from his writings as well), little here is, well, gonzo enough to fully do the man justice--it would be nice if there were more odd moments like the one where conservative pundit William F. Buckley, Jr., of all people, recites Thompson's description of Richard Nixon as "a man with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad." The film is clumsily edited; even at just 77 minutes, it feels too long, and while the bits detailing his funeral and suicide note are interesting, the final parade of sentimental encomiums from the various talking heads is disappointingly pat. Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride is OK, but actually reading Thompson's work would