_The following is a re-printed excerpt from my report on March’s SXSW Film Festival:_After trying to hail a cab at the only dead intersection in all of downtown Austin, Craig and I finally made it to the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse with seconds to spare before a showing of Alex Gibney’s hot-offa-Sundance documentary “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.” The celebrated filmmaker (who just won an Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side”* a couple weeks ago) has successfully brought to life the work of a maverick and prescient writer who we will never see the likes of again.Okay, I’ll admit, I’m a little biased, having read and enjoyed at least four of the man’s books. But-if anything-I would think that would make me a tougher audience, too. Gibney starts it off right, reading from a column Thompson wrote on September 11, 2001, where the off-kilter journalist, writing for ESPN, correctly predicted the aftermath of this terrible strike way before we were ready to even accept that it had even happened.”It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.” (Click here to read the full piece.)Although he may have been slipping in his old age (a point that the movie doesn’t shy away from), that quote proves that even in his darkest hour, the man knew his stuff and could write it with more blunt truth than anyone else.There’s a lot of ground to cover in “Gonzo,” and Gibney does it with the author’s own words, as read, appropriately, by Johnny Depp. But the documentarian is also smart enough to address the journalistic quandry of Thompson’s writing as well as its legend. At one point does the reporter become the story? Can “a salt shaker half full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers” actually illuminate the point or does that style of writing completely miss it? It should be obvious to anyone who watches “Gonzo” that Thompson’s perspective was challenging. And while it made for recklessly entertaining and thought-provoking writing, it was Hell on the home front.”Gonzo” is at once a celebration of a genre-busting writer/rabble-rouser and an elegy for a time period when a freak like Thompson could get access to political leaders and actually affect some kind of radical change. Interviews with Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, and Pat Buchanan are particularly enlightening and “Gonzo” made wish we had someone like Raoul Duke embedded in the current presidential race, telling it like it is-or as they see it.