Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist who chronicled the wreckage of sixties American idealism, is the subject of this rarely seen 1988 profile. The film catches him at home in Woody Creek, Colorado, drinking, shooting guns, and talking in the clipped, profane style that made his writing on Nixon, the Hells Angels, and the Kentucky Derby famous. Friends and collaborators appear alongside him, filling in the picture of a writer who turned his own excess into a reporting method. The film does not try to soften him or explain away the drugs and the paranoia; it treats them as part of the same instinct that made him a useful witness to a country coming apart. What emerges is less a biography than a document of a specific moment when Thompson's contrarian, wrecked persona still looked like the clearest available read on where American optimism had gone.