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“Almost 30 years since Dr. Hunter S. Thompson spoke to a crowd at the U of I in Champaign-Urbana, an unruly crowd of stoners and drunks and miscellaneously adjective-deprived states far removed from what society back then deemed normal. They followed the bouncing beach ball to whatever beat bellowed from the PA, but what they followed to find themselves there I never knew -- which was too bad because at the time I was a reporter. I carried a pad.”

I wrote that on the Blackberry while waiting for the documentary “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” to begin. A memory of the last time I saw Thompson -- renowned "new journalist" -- writing the words brought back some truths maintained in my mind all these years and by the time the end credits rolled on the movie I saw the lack of those truths became the problem with the film itself.

The details in my mind of that evening too many decades ago:

-Thompson had no speech; he answered questions from the audience.

-Arriving late, he showed up shortly after the bottle of Wild Turkey and a glass with some ice appeared.

-Most important: After the audience ran out of questions about drugs and wild life, he began to get questions about writing and journalism. The more of these types of questions, which brought out more emotional and detailed answers instead of one-liners, the more of the unruly crowd slipped out of the auditorium into the night.

So to what did my wondering eyes appear when I dug up the old article, my first-hand account at the time of these memories above? Only the first two details appeared. I left-out the good stuff in the third detail, the stuff that really mattered.

The best way to experience the life of Thompson is to read his works, most especially “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972” and “Fear and Loathing in Last Vegas” and I will admit the film could potentially steer people towards Thompson’s writings but it also steers away from the truth of the matter at hand. The same truth I left out of my own long-ago report…

Thompson at his best would write about what we needed to hear, not what we wanted to hear. “Gonzo” fails in that it concentrates on celebrating the crowd-pleasing upside of his madness, the fun of feeding a fantastic appetite for booze and pills, but barely touches the inevitable downside and cost of such a lifestyle. Sure is cool to see somebody get fucked-up and shooting off guns, yessirreebob! But what happened to the last twenty years of his life? How did his thoughts and writing deteriorate until the most radical reaction he could muster was blowing his head off with a gun?

Roger Ebert’s review contains a much clearer description of what I'm trying to get here:

In all the memories gathered together in "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," there was one subject I found conspicuously missing: The fact of the man's misery. Did he never have a hangover? The film finds extraordinary access to the people in his life, but not even from his two wives do we get a description I would dearly love to read, on what he was like in the first hour or two after he woke up. He was clearly, deeply, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and after a stupor-induced sleep he would have awakened in a state of withdrawal. He must have administered therapeutic dozes of booze or pills or something to quiet the tremors and the dread. What did he say at those times? How did he behave? Are the words "fear and loathing" autobiographical?

Most importantly to me, vividly and emotionally, is the scene narrated by his wife who tries to describe what he was like while he was writing. We see him typing away in his personally peculiar fashion, not attacking the keyboard as you would imagine by the tenor of his words, but instead his fingers dance across the keyboard as if they’re doing the old soft-shoe to Whispering Jack Smith singing his 1927 hit tune “Me and My Shadow”. Thompson has a smile on his face, in heaven as the thoughts of his mind and actions of his body synch together in perfect rhythm.

Now I have a hankering to hear Warren Zevon sing “The Hula Hula Boys” and you need to read Thompson’s “The Curse of Lono” to find out why.