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).
