Still gonzo after all these years: Hunter S. Thompson's legacy lives on in a TV documentary

It's been 16 months since the ashes of manic journalist Hunter S. Thompson were hurled through the Aspen sky. Shot forth from a giant fist-shaped cannon, to be exact, which is exactly how the Good Doctor, never boring-ordinary in life — nor on paper — so wished.

But his impact is unwavering; he was a crazy force who revolutionized reportage in the late 1960s and early '70s and became a touchstone of defiance and machismo. He gave us a word — "gonzo" — that defined a type of writing that warped neutrality. Somewhere, some creative-type, most certainly at night, is chugging Chivas and pounding away on a typewriter, pining for Thompson. (Maybe typing up Thompson's own words, which is what he used to do, meticulously studying Fitzgerald and Hemingway to hone his own craft).

When college journalism profs talk point of view, students obediently thumb through Thompson's legendary, oh-so-subjective works: "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail." When there's something scathing to be said about politics or sports or myriad other aspects of popular culture, say, the "Dumbness of America," folks saturated in Thompson trivia reminisce.

Before he died, Thompson was writing a column for ESPN.com (might a blog have come next?). More recently, you might have spotted him in a film that just played in Seattle, whose title can be printed only as "F***." (He gave one of the last interviews of his life for this documentary.) And he turned up in print in the recently released "The Joke's Over" by Ralph Steadman, a memoir by the gonzo artist who was Thompson's longtime collaborator.

Now arrives one more look at Thompson, in a Starz documentary, "Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S. Thompson on Film." With plenty of archival footage of the author/journalist — firing his gun, drinking Wild Turkey, opining about the "villain" Richard Nixon — the film, which features testimonies by a cadre of celebrity friends, is a gift for Thompson worshippers.

Watch a clip from the documentary:

While Wayne Ewing gave us a cinema verite look at Thompson being Thompson in the 2003 documentary "Breakfast With Hunter," "Buy the Ticket" is a look back at Thompson's life, particularly the void left behind in the lives of so many luminaries.

For people like me, whose knowledge of the man and his many works is fleeting at best, "Buy the Ticket" rewards as an interesting profile. You may not like what he stood for, nor how he acted professionally, but it's impossible to dismiss this maverick who impressed such a striking list of people. Included in the documentary: actors Bill Murray, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Benicio Del Toro and Gary Busey; writers Tom Wolfe and William F. Buckley Jr.; politicos George McGovern and Gary Hart; and the late broadcast journalist Ed Bradley.

Bradley, nothing but a class act, met Thompson in the 1970s and ended up moving part-time to the same place where Thompson barricaded himself against the world: Woody Creek, Colo.

Truth be told, listening to Bradley and the others in this documentary has piqued my interest in Thompson, whom I never really cared for. I now want to rent the two films that portray Thompson — "Where the Buffalo Roam" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" — and watch them back-to-back. With a glass of whiskey, of course.

For such a larger-than-life subject, director Tom Thurman ("Sam Peckinpah's West: Legacy of a Hollywood Renegade"; "John Ford Goes to War" ) takes a very measured, straight-ahead approach. Nothing even remotely hallucinatory nor explosive here (although Gary Busey, dictating how he wants to be interviewed — "Talk to me like you're personal" — is a crack-up).

Instead, Thurman's portrait, a mosaic from numerous sources, is one we've all come to know: Thompson the iconoclast who snubbed the establishment, broke literary and journalistic conventions and became a popular culture icon. In his cotton hat, tinted aviator sunglasses, cigarette dangling from his mouth, he was, literally and figuratively, a caricature. (He was the model for the "Uncle Duke" character in the "Doonesbury" comic strip). Steadman's splattery drawings of Thompson, as well as the many others that accompanied Thompson's writings, appear throughout the film.

The film is narrated by that marvelous guttural gem, Nick Nolte.

After a montage of celebrity quotes — "Whatever he was, whatever species he was, it was definitely male," says Sean Penn — Thurman gives us Thompson's biography. Young Thompson: born in Kentucky, arrested for robbery, enlisting in the Air Force. Counterculture Thompson: his unique brand of "participatory" journalism; his Owl Creek "fortress" in Woody Creek, where he could fire guns and sunbathe naked. And the conflicted Thompson: living up to his self-created public image; killing himself in his own house in February 2005.

Steadman notes how Thompson, decades earlier, spoke about "feeling real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment."

In his suicide note, Thompson wrote about being 67 years old. "That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring."

The film includes some brief footage from his over-the-top memorial (we see Thompson's plans for it from an interview decades earlier; Ewing did a documentary last year, "When I Die," on the cannon's construction) and a touching rendition of Harry Dean Stanton singing "Danny Boy."

Interviews with Bob Braudis, the Pitkin County sheriff, and Anita Thompson, his second wife, help flush out more about Thompson's nature. (Although I would have liked to have heard more from Thompson about her husband being "the supreme Southern gentleman.")

But the heart of the documentary is the deconstruction of the two films, "Where the Buffalo Roam" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," with their respective stars, Murray and Depp, who each portrayed Thompson. If Thompson was, as Nolte tells us, a man who liked to "keep in close touch and just out of reach," then it is Thompson's influence on both these actors that gives us something to hold on to.

Depp recounts something Murray passed on to him: That by deciding to portray Thompson, by deciding to let Thompson seep into his skin, he will forever find himself becoming Thompson at points in his life.

(Thompson, the outlaw, had his whiskey; Captain Jack Sparrow, his rum).

"Buy the Ticket" should satisfy those who have absorbed every bit of Thompson and still crave more. For the rest of us, it will spark newfound interest.

Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com