My version of The Godfather would open with a voice in the darkness saying, “I don’t believe in America. The American Dream is a once-beguiling fairy tale; show’s over, y’all.” But The Dream is still real to many people, and the violence that powerful private interests have done to it in the last century pains them like a kidney punch.

Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson was one of the wounded, and so is Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Darkside), the far more straight-laced director of the entertaining documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. They share a proprietary sense of outrage over abuses of power they’ve witnessed in their times. For them, America’s Nixons, Enrons and Bush-Cheneys have desecrated the church, the front lawn. For all their passionate trouble-making, there’s no denying that Gibney and the late Thompson, two white males who came up through America’s hallowed institutions (Thompson through the U.S. Air Force; Gibney through Yale), are insiders.

When I went to interview Gibney about Gonzo, I remembered the film’s procession of leathery right-wingers and elites, former Thompson nemeses, who have warm, friendly things to say about “Dr. Gonzo” now that he’s dead, now that his caricature as a gun-toting drughead has endured beyond his politics. I wondered if, in the end, being inside got the hole dug any better than chucking rocks from outside.

…Read more