the rum diary hunter s thompson book review

His compatriots, the down-at-heel photographer, Sala (Michael Rispoli), and the burnt-out basketcase and sometimes journalist, Moberg (Giovanni Ribisi), add ballast to Kemp’s craft, the latter the closest thing to something that might have appeared in the parade of grotesques that made up Withnail, if Withnail had forsaken ’60s London for somewhere a little warmer. “Are they not complimentary?” he asks of his put-upon editor, Lotterman (a fraught Richard Jenkins) as he confronts him with a series of bills as thick as the Bible. Flashes of Hunter’s latter-day madness raise their head in an early LSD trip and the way Kemp motors through the hotel mini bar. As Kemp admits early on, he just hasn’t found his writer’s voice yet. Depp still has his inimitable burr down, but this is a wide-eyed Thompson, only yet coming alive to the horrors of politics and the world.

Depp coaxed Hunter to publish the book and, later, Bruce Robinson out of semi-retirement to script and direct this adaptation.įorget the wretch Johnny Depp portrayed in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Hunter was a younger, more innocent man when he headed for Puerto Rico. Thompson fled America for Puerto Rico to take up a post on El Sportivo magazine, and while there wrote an early manuscript for The Rum Diary. Sensing the switching allegiances back home, Hunter S. America's in the doldrums as the ’60s dawn, Eisenhower’s grasp on the country is dwindling and Richard Nixon’s march to power is on the rise.

The rum diary hunter s thompson book review