Coolest. journalist. ever.

When filming a documentary about a writer so eccentric, talented, and gigantically presenced that a peer describes him as having had “the attributes of an action hero,” the risk is less that you’ll render his story uninteresting than you’ll end up with a feature filled with chaos.

Not with Alex Gibney at the helm, however. The Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Darkside and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room – both docs that brilliantly distilled what felt like a Google’s worth of facts into digestible viewing – again plucked, jiggered, and embellished wisely to create Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a dense but enthralling biography that manages to keep its focus on the Rolling Stone journalist while exploring Gibney’s political obsession at the same time.

Gonzo begins not at but near the end of Thompson’s life, specifically a piece he wrote for ESPN’s Web site on Sept. 11, 2001. As a lookalike dramatizes Thompson at a typewriter – an approach not as cheesy as it sounds – and a clip of the smoldering World Trade Center plays in a makeshift Woody Creek, Colo., living room, Johnny Depp reads parts of the prescient article in voiceover: “We’re going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens is hard to say….This is going to be a very expensive war, and victory is not guaranteed – for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush.”

“Hunter” and his desk are then shown facing a window, but the scenery isn’t tree-lined. Instead, there’s a very cool news mash-up, a collage of politicians and war footage flickering while “All Along the Watchtower” plays and propels the narrative back 40-odd years to Vietnam, the 1968 Democratic convention, Nixon’s presidency, and other events that helped birth the Dr. Thompson persona.

No, the soundtrack isn’t exactly original – “Piece of My Heart,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and, most pedestrian, “Sympathy for the Devil” plays during ’60s and ’70s sequences as well – but that’s the film’s biggest misstep. Otherwise, this two-hour soak in Thompson’s life and career is as gonzo as his famed writing style.

With the help of commentators as varied as Jann Wenner, Tom Wolfe, Pat Buchanan, Jimmys Carter and Buffett, and Thompson’s family (first wife Sondi, son Juan, and second wife Anita), Gibney depicts the journalist’s ascent more or less chronologically, from the works that put him on the literary radar (a book on Hell’s Angels and an article on the Kentucky Derby that was about everything but the race itself) to his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas heyday to his final pieces for ESPN.com before his 2005 suicide.

But Gibney takes some fun detours: The director, who was granted access to family artifacts and even unpublished manuscripts, devotes time to Thompson’s out-of-nowhere and nearly successful 1970 run to become the sheriff of Aspen, complete with a campaign commercial, film of press conferences, and, most amusingly, Thompson’s “tentative platform,” which is read by Depp – who, for no reason, is casually holding a gun pointed ceilingward – and includes changing Aspen’s name to “Fat City” and effecting a law that “No drug worth taking should be sold for money.”

All of Depp’s narrative are Thompson’s own words, and when there’s no footage, the director invents, such as a passage from Hell’s Angels about the author’s midnight motorcycle rides that’s accompanied by a dark, blurred, exhilarating driver’s-perspective reimagining. And, naturally, Gibney includes clips from the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing, in which Depp himself played the doc, aka “Raoul Duke,” alongside Benicio Del Toro, both hilarious as characters tripping their faces off. Artist and frequent Thompson collaborator Richard Steadman shows off his electrifying paintings of Thompson and the events they covered, and is a general hoot as he talks about the man who introduced him to hallucinogenics.

Gonzo always comes back to the political world, however, which gives the bio unexpected – but never burdensome – weight. Most wrenchingly, Gibney’s friends and family assert that Thompson may have literally died by gunshot but metaphorically by flashback, and not the acid- or PSTD-induced kind. Politics could animate and depress Thompson, and in 1972, the failure of his supported presidential candidate, George McGovern, to unseat Richard Nixon and bring a swift end to the Vietnam War left him dejected.

More detrimental to his mental health, however, was witnessing history repeat: “The nightmare we’re in today is essentially the same as the nightmare he described back then,” colleague Tim Crouse says, elegantly and sorrowfully ruminating on disastrous administrations, lost lives, and a country that’s low on hope. Thompson’s second wife, Anita, is more direct: “I started worrying about him right after the Bush election. That was the trigger.”

Suddenly, Gonzo moves you to not only mourn an icon, but feel the despair that finally led to the suicide he’d had always threatened. Like Gibney’s previous work, though, you walk away from the documentary melancholy yet informed, in a state that rustles your mind instead of sinks your soul.

And ending with footage of Thompson’s memorial service – his ashes being shot out above a self-designed monument of his two-thumbed, peyote-holding emblem – is appropriately celebratory. An older Thompson characterizes himself this way: “I’m an idiot. I’m a fool. I know. But I’ve been a good read, right?”

At this point in the War on Terror, sitting through a feature-length documentary that regurgitates details about torture in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay may very well violate the Geneva Conventions. News outlets and water-cooler talk long ago exhausted the topic of Abu Ghraib and its sister catastrophes. Many of us understand that this presidency and its worldwide conflicts has been a disaster. Does anyone really want to watch another nearly two-hour analysis of it?

Regardless of whether it finds an audience, Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side gets points (in addition to its Academy Award nomination) for the thoroughness and intelligence it offers along with its good intentions.

The film is very reminiscent of last year’s Iraq doc No End in Sight—another Oscar nominee that Gibney produced—in terms of overall quality and ability to induce teeth-gnashing, using one unfortunate cab driver’s wrong place, wrong time, wrongful death story to launch into a breakdown of how the American military’s interrogation system has, well, broken down.

Gibney, who also directed the excellent 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, uses a similar approach here: airtight facts and stats (and lots of ‘em), archival footage, interviews with not just talking heads but people who were involved in the incidents, whether as decision-makers (such as John Yoo, the Department of Justice legal counsel who helped write what became known as the “Torture Memos”) or order-takers (several now-remorseful soldiers talk about their experiences with prisoners).

The film is divided into chapters, but it flows like one continuous reiteration of a simple (but no less appalling) story: Around the world, America’s prisoners were/are being treated unfairly, from random capture without habeas corpus to unconscionable interrogations that included sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, and “stress positions” such as standing with outstretched arms for hours straight to, often, death.

The government assured any critics that such incidents were a matter of overenthusiastic, unbalanced troops taking matters into their own hands. Then we see Donald Rumsfeld’s initialed approval of a memo outlining slightly less severe versions of these tactics, along with a scribbled note, “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why only 4 for detainees?” In a press conference, Rummy dismisses the comment as a joke.

Not surprisingly, it’s all rather sickening. Gibney wallpapers his film with images of prisoners naked, bruised, and bloodied, frightened out of their minds with dogs barking in their faces, piled on top of one another like trash. Some, perhaps, were “the worst of the worst” as Rumsfeld stated.

Still, all it takes is a few wise words from former FBI special agent Jack Cloonan to understand that, whether the detainees are guilty or not, you’re much more likely to get useful information out of them by building a rapport instead of, you know, beating them to within an inch of their lives.

Gibney’s father, a now-deceased World War II vet, puts it more eloquently in a clip at the end of the film: “Behind the façade of wartime hatred, there was a central rule of law, and we believed in it. It was what made America different.”