Gonzo Girl has its US première at Tribeca Film Festival, 12 June 2025
Gonzo Girl opens with the now obsolete clatter of a typewriter’s keys being hit, and text that appears on screen letter by letter: “The story I’m about to tell you is partly true.”, only for the last two words to be deleted in reverse, also letter by letter, and replaced first with “somewhat” and then with “essentially true”. In other words, this is going to be a film of a decidedly literary bent, set in a time – namely 1992 – when the typewriter had not yet disappeared, but was gradually yielding to home computing technologies new. After all, only one year earlier in 1991, IBM had seen the writing on the wall and sold off its entire typewriter division. Anyone at this time who owned an electronic typewriter, which allowed for a degree of Tippex-free corrections, was simultaneously at the cutting edge of their own technology, and already a dinosaur in the emerging digital world.
Further ‘typed’ text may suggest that “The names have been changed to protect the innocent… and the not-so-innocent”, but it is obvious from the start – indeed even from the film’s title – who author Walker Reade (Willem Dafoe) is supposed to be. For with his stated status as “the father of gonzo journalism”, his cult-like following, his white bucket hat, tinted sunglasses, cigarette holder and loud shirts, his unmatchable intake of drugs and alcohol, and his love of firearms, this is clearly none other than Hunter S. Thompson. Yet it is also Thompson in his later years of decline – himself, like that typewriter, now something of a dinosaur. “You’re better than that,” smart young fan and would-be author Alley Russo (Camila Morrone) tells Walker, unimpressed by a “cop-out answer” that he gives during an informal Q&A at a rare live reading in New York – and the truth is that Walker has by now become a caricature of himself, trapped in his own wild man reputation, and himself unsure who he is supposed to be anymore. “What do you want from me?” is the question he asks at the beginning of this crowded reading, as though unsure of how exactly to deliver on audience expectations largely predicated on a version of him that is, like this film’s, only partly, somewhat, essentially non-fictionalised.
Impressed by Alley’s “thick skin”, Walker’s long-term caretaker Claudia (the ever-welcome Patricia Arquette, who is here also debuting as director) hires the broke bartender to move into the ranch at Aspen, Colorado and to become Walker’s assistant. This job involves corralling the work-shy cokehead into typing out a couple of pages per day, before the publishers – represented by editor Lionel (James Urbaniak) – cut him off entirely and demand their large advance back, most of which has already been blown on drugs. Alley’s own literary aspirations have been curtailed by her inability to find her own “original voice”, but she soon realises that she is rather good at imitating Walker’s voice – and so she secretly becomes his ghost writer, wrangling his largely addled, incoherent ramblings into words that approximate the rhythms and cadences of his peak period in the Seventies, which is to say the Walker that his adoring readership longs to hear again, rather than the shadow of him with whom Alley is dealing day and night.
The day after Alley arrives, she goes to the nearby town with Walker, says yes (on Claudia’s advice) to an offered cocktail of hard narcotics, and then, as the drugs kick in, hallucinates wildly while being driven fast down the road in his red convertible. The scene is an obvious reimagining of the famous first paragraph of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), already lent memorable visual form in the opening sequence of Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film adaptation. “I have become a character in a Walker Reade story,” declares Alley in voice-over – and if everything here feels a little second-hand, as though it has all been done before and only the names have been changed, then such belatedness is precisely what Gonzo Girl captures. For here, everyone, from Walker’s publishers to Alley to his readership, wants him to recreate his glory days (as both writer and gonzo protagonist of his own writings), even as, so many years and drugs later, he seems reluctant – and quite possibly unable – to keep playing that rôle and filling the shoes of that myth.
It is a myth. Even in Fear and Loathing…, Thompson appeared not as himself, but in the guise of protagonist ‘Raoul Duke’. And in this film, he is ‘Walker Reade’, who constantly plays dress-ups and buys whole wardrobes of clothes for Alley too. As she cosplays as “the wide-eyed girl in the tennis dress” for Walker, Alley herself is just a mask – the pseudonymous persona of Cheryl Della Pietra, from whose debut novel Gonzo Girl (2015), part memoir, part fiction (just like Thompson’s own novels), Arquette’s film has been freely adapted (by Rebecca Thomas and Jessica Caldwell). All these layers of masquerade make it hard to find the ‘real’ Thompson, the man behind the myth – but then Gonzo Girl is more interested in a different kind of truth, about the illusion of image and celebrity, and the toll of ageing.
Everyone wants a piece of Walker. There is his young, blonde lover Devaney Peltier (Elizabeth Lail), willing to make herself available for his every whim in exchange for basking in the light of his genius. There is the actor Larry Lukes (Ray Nicholson), seeking to absorb Walker’s lifestyle and likeness in order to play him convincingly in a coming film (as Bill Murray had in Art Linson’s Where the Buffalo Roam, 1980, as Johnny Depp had in Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing… and Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diaries, 2011, and of course as DeFoe does here). Meanwhile Alley is also vampiric, sucking up the last traces of Walker’s talent, fancying that she can do a better job than he can at (re)writing in his voice, all in parasitic pursuit of her own literary career – and imagining, in her hubris, that nobody knows what she is up to when in fact she is only doing exactly what she has been hired to do all along.
Perhaps, though, the most vampiric of all is Walker himself, needing all these people in his circle to remind him who he is or was, and to stave off his own fear and self-loathing. “Not everybody gets to be the main character,” Claudia tells Alley. Alley, despite being the ‘gonzo girl’ of the film’s title, struggles to find her way out of Walker’s orbit (where she has lost herself), and eventually defining herself through him in her own writings – while it is Walker’s tragedy to be stuck even more inescapably in that same orbit too, so much of an icon that he has almost ceased being a real person.
strap: Fame Hunter: Patricia Arquette’s directorial debut tracks an iconic writer and his young assistant caught in the illusory orbit of celebrity
© Anton Bitel
