‘Gonzo Girl’ Review: Willem Dafoe and Camila Morrone Play a Writer and His Acolyte in Patricia Arquette’s Uneven Directorial Debut – Hollywood Reporter

Gonzo Lady, Patricia Arquette’s function directorial debut, shouldn’t be technically about Hunter S. Thompson. It’s a couple of Hunter S. Thompson sort, Walker Reade (Willem Dafoe), invented by Cheryl Della Pietra for her semi-autobiographical novel impressed by her temporary stint as Thompson’s assistant. Nevertheless it’s probably not about Walker, both. Its heroine is Alley Russo (Camila Morrone), Della Pietra’s fictionalized analogue, a fresh-faced faculty grad plucked from obscurity to assist out her idol as he writes his new novel.

It’s by way of Alley’s eyes that we come to know the quirks of this genius, experiencing each his magnetism and his informal cruelty. It’s Alley’s journey we hint into the near-surreal chaos surrounding him, and Alley’s profession aspirations we’re meant to root for. However Rebecca Thomas and Jessica Caldwell’s uneven script undermines its personal goals. Ultimately, Gonzo Lady is extra persuasive as a portrait of a icon in decline than it’s of a rising star wresting management of her personal story.

Walker comes by way of loud and clear from the movie’s first moments, because the “father of gonzo journalism” struts right into a e-book studying with the swagger of a rock star. It’s hardly information at this level in Dafoe’s profession that he will be excellent at going very massive, but it surely’s a pleasure to observe him work nonetheless. Walker glows with a white-hot charisma that makes it clear why so many are drawn to him, and burns with an unpredictability that offers his very presence an fringe of hazard. That is the (not fairly) Hunter S. Thompson persona that’s enchanted followers for the reason that Sixties, whose sunglasses-clad smirk has been immortalized in movies like Concern and Loathing in Las Vegas and who lives on to this present day within the cultural reminiscence as each distinctive icon and acquainted archetype.

By the point Alley will get to Walker’s Colorado hideaway within the Nineteen Nineties, nevertheless, he’s extra prolific at snorting traces than writing them. Alley’s been employed to stay by his facet from 9 at night time till 5 within the morning, doing no matter she should to get him typing by 2 a.m. “We each comprehend it’s a sham,” she thinks to herself in one in every of Gonzo Lady‘s intermittent voiceovers. “He hasn’t written something value studying in 15 years.” Nonetheless, pushed in equal measure by her need to show herself to her literary hero and her want for the cash this job guarantees her, she throws herself headfirst into his dizzying routine of events, benders and purchasing sprees.

Earlier than lengthy, Alley finds herself intoxicated, and never simply by the mountains of cocaine and rivers of whiskey. “He has a capability to make the whole lot really feel like an journey,” she marvels. A picnic with Walker is rarely only a picnic, however a possibility for him and his movie-star bestie (Ray Nicholson) to troll their neighbor Rick Springfield (enjoying himself) with fireworks; a day dangle with a pal devolves into an excellent paint combat. So Alley takes the medicine he presents her, learns to hold together with his hard-partying crowd, trades her frumpy faculty sweaters for lacy minidresses. She develops a rapport with Walker flirtatious sufficient to draw the ire of his present squeeze, the perpetually soused and bikini-clad Devaney (Elizabeth Lail). And he or she writes — rewriting Walker’s prose earlier than faxing the pages to his editor (James Urbaniak), and scribbling her personal observations in a journal in her down time.

Gonzo Lady‘s disinterest in judging its characters too harshly is one in every of its strengths. Even because the movie acknowledges the uneven energy dynamic in its central pair, the movie grants Alley the company to make her personal decisions and work by way of her personal sophisticated feelings within the face of Walker’s towering affect. Arquette adores a showy sequence to carry us into Alley’s subjective expertise — golden sparks and cooed Italian to indicate a boozy romantic excessive, woozy hallucinations to seize her disorientation on acid. Collectively, they convey the ecstatic pleasure of her spell with Walker, if not essentially the emotional exhaustion accompanying it.

However Alley is saved at arm’s size by an awkwardly paced script that has her remodel seemingly in a single day. We barely get an opportunity to parse how Alley feels in regards to the world she’s been thrust into earlier than she turns into part of it — or, later, to surprise if she’s in too deep earlier than she’s being warned by a involved pal that she is. Morrone is a likable display screen presence who pours herself into Alley’s curiosity or her anger, her tenderness or her anguish. But her tears would certainly hit tougher if we understood higher the place they had been coming from. (In the meantime, the supposed sexual pressure between Morrone and Dafoe is forged in such broad strokes that we really feel little of both its pleasure or its peril.) Gonzo Lady may by no means be completely boring when there’s all the time one other substance to be tried, one other celebration crowd to appeal, one other grand speech to jot down. However the shortchanging of its ostensible lead makes it lower than totally participating.

Walker is simpler to parse, partially as a result of he’s preceded by the legend of the true Thompson. The parable of the supposedly singular male genius is contradicted by Gonzo Lady‘s deal with the strenuous group effort required to prop it up, a lot of it finished by girls. Although he’s constructed his repute and his fortune on the ability of his phrases, Alley’s makes an attempt to get him to take a seat down and write appear akin to squeezing blood from a stone. His day-to-day affairs — managing his employees, selecting up his medicine, shoveling the peacock shit littering his properties — are left to Claudia (Arquette), a longtime assistant owed years of again pay. Walker’s persistently brash public persona attracts associates and admirers, however Gonzo Lady additionally lets us into quieter moments spent cuddling platonically with Claudia or rehashing bittersweet childhood reminiscences with Alley.

“Not everybody will get to be the primary character,” Claudia muses to an more and more disillusioned Alley, months into her keep. “All of us make the e-book in our personal manner.” Her phrases, mild although they’re, come as restricted consolation to a younger girl whose dream has been to make her personal identify on the literary scene, not toil anonymously for another person’s. This movie’s very existence would appear a rebuke to Claudia’s remark, proof that predominant characters will not be all the time the place, or who, the world expects them to be. It’s solely too dangerous that, having put Alley entrance and heart, the movie however retains her at a distance. For all of the indelible highs and lows of Alley’s time with Walker (or, one can presume, of Della Pietra’s with Thompson) — and for its occasional, fleeting joys — Gonzo Lady makes no comparable mark.

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