Hell, Depp imbued the author’s spirit into the voice of a lizard in the animated Rango. Depp’s take on Thompson proxy Raoul Duke in 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is iconic. But his enthusiasm for all things Thompson – they’re longtime friends and native Kentuckians – helped get the novel published (in 1998) and the movie produced. You may think that Depp, 48, has passed his sell-by date to play a young Turk. Lotterman can tell Kemp is lying when the writer describes his drinking as being “at the upper end of social.” Kemp is soon hanging with such kindred spirits as the Star‘s sharp-tongued photographer Sala (the excellent Michael Rispoli) and lunatic Moberg (a scene-stealing Giovanni Ribisi), a former reporter living on the far edges of his personal acid trip. Richard Jenkins is a hoot as Lotterman, the editor with a bad rug and a worse temper. Robinson, whose 1987 Withnail & I fully earns its immortal cult status, excels with actors. The Rum Diary, written and directed by Bruce Robinson, expertly cannonballs into the grit and glam with raw exuberance. And that, I’m pleased to report, is something to see.ĭepp plays Thompson alter ego Paul Kemp, a budding New York journalist soaking up sun and rum in Puerto Rico circa 1960, as a new hire on The San Juan Star, a rag staffed by – in Thompson’s words – “wild young Turks who wanted to rip the world in half and start all over again” and “degenerates and hopeless losers who could barely write a postcard – loons and fugitives and dangerous drunks.” Kemp had found a home. But damn if the movie – a passion project for its star and co-producer, Johnny Depp – isn’t alive to the challenge of capturing the gonzo master in the act of inventing himself. Or that the film version, finished two years ago but only now being released, isn’t classic cinema. So it doesn’t matter too much that The Rum Diary, a semiautobiographical novel that Thompson wrote when he was 22 (see photo on book cover), isn’t his finest work.
From his first piece for Rolling Stone, in 1970 – he was 33 – to the publication of his suicide note in 2005, the good doctor’s hallucinogenic rumblings on the decadent and the depraved made literary history.
Hunter S.Thompson are a part of the DNA of this magazine.
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