True/False co-director David Wilson presented recent Oscar winner Alex Gibney with the festival’s True Vision Award on Saturday, before a screening of Gibney’s latest opus, Gonzo. The film takes a comprehensive look at the zeitgeist-defining glory years and post-middle-age decline of journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose commitment to truth through fictionalization inspired Wilson to brand him “a man who could well be the patron saint of True/False.” In introducing Gibney, Wilson noted that the festival was proud to host the director on his first stop after last week’s Oscar ceremony. When he reached the mic, Gibney corrected the record. “This is not my first stop after that event in Hollywood,” the filmmaker said. “I looked at that as a warm-up to True/False.”

The True Vision Award is designed to honor mid-career filmmakers who, in the words of Wilson, “are pushing the non-fiction form forward.” It’s a bit of a disappointment, then, that formally, Gonzo swings wildly between stylistic experimentation and rote talking-head traditionalism. Shooting on high def video to appease producers Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, who will release the film theatrically under the auspices of Magnolia before broadcasting Gonzo on their HD Net TV, Gibney seems to struggle to transcend the standard visual tropes of the medium. The bulk of the film consists of sit-down interviews with expert witnesses, including Thompson’s son and two ex-wives, Jann Wenner and Pat Buchanan; much of the rest of the footage is culled from fiction films about Thompson and previous documentaries. When Gibney does take chances––such as when he casts actors in a home-video style reenactment set to an actual audio recording of Thompson’s visit to a Nevada taco stand, the transcription of which formed a chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas––the end result is not dissimilar to something one might see on basic cable. There are inspired ideas here, but with its sometimes awkward video effects and general made-for-TV patina, the whole thing looks a little downmarket for a filmmaker of Gibney’s caliber.

Which is not to say that Gonzo doesn’t offer valuable insight into Thompson’s life, work, and, especially, the power of his celebrity. By 1972, Thompson’s notoriety and influence was reaching its peak, with his bi-weekly coverage of the presidential election for Rolling Stone. Through repeatedly paralleling then to now, Vietnam to Iraq, Bush to Nixon, Gibney makes the case that what the world needs now is not necessarily a “change candidate” like Obama, but a journalist of Thompson’s stripe: unpredictable, beholden to no one, and absolutely unafraid to show blatant bias in one column and––as he did with his coverage of George McGovern––betray that same bias in the next.

Gibney worked on Gonzo and his Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side simultaneously. ‘Thank god I had both of those, because the dark side of Taxi was pretty dark,” he joked after Saturday’s screening, acknowledging that the underlying themes of one film informed his approach to the other. “To some extent, I think the media has muzzled itself because it’s bought a phony argument about objectivity from the people in power,” Gibney said. “I don’t think anybody can be objective when you see those images of people going off to war in ‘72, and of people going off to war today. You get this haunting feeling that we’ve been here before.”

Gibney said he thinks the media’s obsession with objectivity has created a vaccum, which filmmakers have rushed to fill with highly subjective treatments of the War on Terror. “I think sometimes my films are able to get through [to an audience] because they’re doing things that [the media] haven’t done. There seems to be an opportunity for these independent documentaries to really get at the emotional truth, the poetic truth, that the traditional media can’t.”

In perhaps the ultimate example of where the traditional media’s interests lie today, Gibney said he was all but ignored by journalists backstage at the Oscars, with the only question thrown at him in the press room coming from a friend who happened to be a member of the Australian press. “I thought about dressing up as Johnny Depp,” Gibney joked. “That would would have got me more time on the red carpet, I think.” But otherwise, “I’m not sure people knew about [Taxi].”