Gonzo Girl — Patricia Arquette [Tribeca ’25 Review]

The author Hunter S. Thompson is widely credited with founding the “Gonzo journalism” movement, which is informally defined as incorporating subjective language and satire into immersive journalism. However, Thompson’s legend was equally burnished by his well-documented drug use, affinity for guns, and disdain for authority figures. It enshrined the writer as both provocateur and rockstar, but the profession is still beholden to boring obligations like tapping out coherent pages and meeting deadlines. Being a hugely celebrated, walking bacchanal doesn’t absolve someone from having editors breathing down their neck. That means surrounding oneself with grown-ups who are responsible for such niceties as paying the bills, cleaning up the house, procuring large amounts of narcotics, and, of course, making sure the writing is being done on time is a necessity. Frankly, it all sounds like a colossal pain in the ass, particularly if your employer is an abusive coke fiend and letch in the throes of paranoid delusions.

Gonzo Girl, the directorial debut from actress Patricia Arquette, spins a salacious if pretty dubious account of what being a de facto wet nurse to Thompson must have been like. Insulating itself from claims of fabulism, the film is based on the author Cheryl Della Pietra’s roman à clef inspired by the five months she spent as Thompson’s personal assistant in the early ’90s. And, as the film makes strenuously clear, it’s not technically about Thompson. Instead, it’s about the fictional author Walker Reade — portrayed here by William Dafoe, with a cigarette holder clenched between his teeth and donning both aviator glasses and a bucket hat — and any similarities to the man who inspired Raoul Duke are, if not coincidental, then certainly unactionable (Thompson, of course, has been dead for 20 years). Yet even with a throat-clearing onscreen disclaimer asserting that the film is “essentially” true, the whole thing comes across as opportunistic and self-aggrandizing with Gonzo Girl arguing that Della Pietra’s fictional surrogate not only matched the hard-partying Thompson (sorry, Reade) shot for shot and line of blow for line of blow, but was secretly ghostwriting his new book; surreptitiously rewriting Reade’s flawed prose and faxing it off to to the acclaim of the author’s editor. It’s a fantastical account of a young writer discovering her voice, bedding a dreamy movie star, standing up for herself against a bully, and experiencing the consciousness-upending effects of psychotropics all while intuiting what really matters. In truth, it plays at times like a dramatized essay of what the author did over their summer vacation.

Della Pietra’s Gonzo Girl stand-in goes by the name of Alley Russo (Camila Morrone), introduced here as a self-serious, slightly dowdy young woman struggling to find her place in the world after college. An aspiring author working as a bartender in New York City, Alley attends a book reading celebrating Reade where she draws attention to herself for publicly criticizing him for giving a “cop out answer” to a softball audience question. After briefly trading barbs with Reade, a mortified Alley is buttonholed by the writer’s longtime live-in assistant, Claudia (a blowsy Arquette, pulling double duty), who offers Alley a job on the spot. Arguing she knows what Walker needs (“I’m not looking for Joan Didion, I just need a hard worker with thick skin”), Claudia writes her number down on a $100 bill and asks Alley to be on a plane to Colorado in 24 hours for the opportunity of a lifetime, in the sort of dramatic contrivance which is the film’s stock-in-trade. Sure enough, Alley flies across the county on a few hours notice and finds herself at Reade’s secluded ranch where the author is already three sheets to the wind, prowling the premises with a rifle, and chasing after much younger women. As Alley gets settled in at the house, she’s given the lay of the land by Claudia: Alley is to keep tabs on Walker from 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM and to ensure he writes at least a couple pages a night to placate his exasperated editor. Also, she’s told she should probably “stop saying no” in the sort of “it was a different time” advice we’re meant to recognize signals the assignment will be a perpetual HR nightmare.

In less than a day, Alley is being hit on by an ever-grinning film actor hanging around the house (Ray Nicholson, playing a composite character at least partially inspired by his real-life father, Jack), firing handguns at cardboard cut-outs of Reagan, trading in her conservative sweater vests for form-fitting dresses and dropping acid with her boss as a carrot to get him to sit down in front of his typewriter and do his goddamn job. But while Alley gets a front row seat to the narcotized, sexually-charged madness — in a scene which qualifies in the parlance of the film as “two birds and we’re all stoned,” Alley and Walker do mushrooms with a two-time Oscar-winner and friend of Hunter’s in an unbilled cameo and proceed to sensually pour paint over one another–the writing itself remains inconsistent and of generally inferior quality. Alley can sense “old-school Walker” struggling to come through, but he just can’t seem to recapture his authentic voice after all these years “expanding his mind” and needs some help — like from a plucky young writer who will dutifully flesh out his pages after he collapses every night, expounding his spotty and uninspired accounts of the criminal underbelly into something that will instantly grab readers. Alley starts passing off her pages as the genuine article, with neither Walker nor his editor ever the wiser.

The most charitable reading of Gonzo Girl is that it’s honoring the spirit of Thompson by exaggerating a firsthand account of a problematic artist in decline, and if some of the particulars have been fudged in the telling — to name but one example, a scene where Alley is thrown into lockup after being arrested for driving under the influence while returning from a drug deal has been entirely fabricated according to Della Pietra — then so be it. Except the problem with Gonzo Girl is it fails to arrive at either a revelatory take or some greater truth about the brilliant yet complicated figure at its center. Instead, it’s content to trade in tawdry, unverifiable details, like Walker trying to seduce Alley by rubbing garlic on her nipples (don’t ask; it supposedly has something to do with the actress Anna Magnani) and a narrative that conveniently elevates the brilliance of a 20-something post-grad at the expense of someone who’s no longer around to call “bullshit” on any of this. Della Pietra’s proximity to Thompson (and with it, an assumed authority on the subject) is the only reason Gonzo Girl even exists, and the film’s a little too pleased with its trail of tabloid breadcrumbs that hint at a world of privilege and drug-fueled mania without ever quite being compelling in and of itself. For all the cocaine, American flag bikinis, and firearms, the film is still fundamentally about watching people write in solitude, a singularly uncinematic act.

Instead, Arquette’s film, which first premiered nearly two years ago at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, oscillates between doing a low-rent take on Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — when Alley tries LSD for the first time, we get plenty of “way out” melting backgrounds and food crawling off of plates – and one of those biopic-adjacent films where a regular person learns an important life lesson due to their brief cohabitation with a celebrity (e.g. My Week with Marilyn, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, etc.). In a showy if superficial role, Dafoe plays Walker as equal parts libertine and tyrant; splitting his time cooing for Alley to get into the hot tub with him and going on spiteful tirades that accuse her of being a spy. But there’s none of the curiosity or laser precision often associated with Thompson, and the sudden turn to a supportive mentor figure in the closing moments feels imposed upon the film solely to give it a sunny resolution. More damning though is Morrone as Alley, who with her slouching posture and flat infection doesn’t exactly radiate the inquisitiveness and preternatural intelligence of the sort required to improve upon a literary giant (mostly she’s just good at recognizing Fitzgerald quotes). Rather, the actress seems more comfortable sliding into the compulsory role of coquettish sexpot which perhaps explains why Arquette keeps filming her in the shower. Stray details do draw blood — the film is implicitly critical of Claudia, who comes across not only as an enabler but as someone well-practiced in sweeping up after Reade’s mistreatment of women — or have the ring of deranged truth, such as Walker showing up to the musician Rick Springfield’s house solely for the purposes of setting off firewalkers out front and mocking him. But in total, Gonzo Girl ultimately boasts all the thematic heft and staying power of an Us Weekly article.