There’s a certain image associated with gonzo journalism – daring, confessional, subversive, male. For all its successes and groundbreaking candor, it’s a style conflated with male ego and excess, the extremes of drugs, adventure and eccentricity that men could afford to pursue.
Gonzo Girl, the directorial debut of the actor Patricia Arquette, seems, at least on the surface, to be interested in complicating that image, or at least adding some footnotes. The 107-minute film, written by Rebecca Thomas and Jessica Caldwell and based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Cheryl Della Pietra, focuses on a young female assistant to a stand-in for Hunter S Thompson in the summer of 1992. Like her real-life counterpart, Alley Russo (Camila Morrone) is a bookish recent grad with literary aspirations who takes a gig assisting a famous writer at his Colorado ranch. Like Thompson, Willem Dafoe’s Walter Reade is a titanic personality, an erratic live wire subsisting on booze, hallucinogens and elephantine amounts of coke (there’s enough bumps in this movie to rival Wolf of Wall Street).
Tellingly, the film begins not with Alley but with Walter, as he conducts a typically volatile and combative reading in New York. Spring-loaded movements, rambling monologues, manic energy – it’s the type of role Dafoe can sink his teeth into, and he eats every scene. Which is a problem for a film that seems interested in the many female figures who support the reputation of singular genius, but has little interest in their lives outside of their relation to him. We get the barest sense of Alley’s personhood before the ranch, other than a clunky mention of needing money and wanting to write; she arrives shy and hesitant, but quickly adapts to the Walter Reade lifestyle – drugs, chaos, shooting guns and writing while high in an assemblage of poses and situations coded, either under his gaze or ours, as erotic.
Alley’s task, as relayed by Walter’s longtime secretary/fixer Claudia (Arquette) is to keep the party going but steer Walter to the typewriter just enough to get some good pages to his editor in New York, lest the cashflow cease. Given the hangers-on, the coke, the partying (including with Ray Nicholson’s Larry, a Hollywood actor who pops in and out) and Walter’s insecure, equally erratic girlfriend Devaney (You’s Elizabeth Lail), this is more difficult than promised. Alley begins channeling her ambitions by keeping a journal about Walter, then by writing as Walter, doctoring up his pages when his lifestyle far outpaces his former ability.
This amounts to a betrayal, though by the time it’s exposed, the relentless debauchery is too tiresome and the characterization too thin to really care, as if the existence of a lot of drugs, or a toxic kind-of mentor, is enough in itself to justify interest. Arquette’s direction outpaces the writing in this regard; the parties and drug trips are at least compellingly styled and shot, but there’s no sense of why Alley participates so willingly, why she’s charmed by Walter, why she continues to stay.
There’s an online joke that Morrone, who managed to eke out some space in the messy ensemble that was Daisy Jones & the Six, has a face that’s seen Instagram, and Gonzo Girl does little to dispel that this is not 1992. Her role is, for the most part, more modeling than acting – a series of ever more sexy outfits that cater to Walter’s taste (maybe?), in various postures of ecstasy, focus or distress. As the film wears on and the walls close in on Walker (at least financially), she fades away from the story, more trope than character.
More interesting is Claudia, a woman whose sweet, somewhat wearied affect masks a sinister, ice-cold self-protective streak – in other words, a typically Arquette creation. Towards the end, as Alley’s tolerance for Walter’s outbursts wanes, Claudia offers what seems to be the justification for all this mess on-screen: that every woman involved, every invisible secretary or assistant or girlfriend, gets some credit for the work, is responsible for some of the magic. It’s a shrug of a thesis on a skin-deep story. I’m certainly not against a movie of imperfect, messy feminism – women figuring out their own way in a crazy environment. But like Alley’s imitations of Walter’s prose, there’s a performative profundity to this inert tale of crossed boundaries, toxic bosses and dozens of lines.
Gonzo Girl is screening at the Toronto film festival
