A tightly wound bundle of everything and its opposite — an anti-authoritarian who ran for sheriff of Aspen, a peace-loving gun nut, an iconoclast who relished winners as much as any football coach — the late Hunter S. Thompson pioneered what might be called psychic-war correspondence: corrosive inner dispatches from the long goodbye of '60s idealism. Alex Gibney's fascinating doc makes Thompson a complex, looming presence, buttressing the author's words (read by Johnny Depp) with vintage Thompson footage. Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) relies too often on glib simplification and smirky music montages of social unrest, but he keeps the focus on Thompson's blazing gift, however unevenly it burned.
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