By WILLIAM ARNOLD Over the past five years, Alex Gibney has become a major force in American documentary film, as the producer of more than a dozen projects (PBS's "The Blues," "No End in Sight") and director of the Oscar-nominated "Enron: The Smartest...

In the old days, so many reporters were colorless scribes in cheap suits who smoked cigars, wore their press passes in the bands of their fedoras and called their stories in. Was that a better system than today's, in which the goal seems to be to achieve a platform from which one may express "voice" and "attitude" and become, rather than simply reporting on, the story? Who knows.

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• Transcript: Talking With Alex Gibney
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How one became the other is a complex tale, but all who tell it must deal with one of its primary functionaries: Hunter S. Thompson, the Rolling Stone reporter who introduced a form of participatory, crazed, possibly booze- and hallucinogenic-driven reportage called "gonzo." There'll never be another like him and some may say there never should have been even one like him, but the story is told, more or less, in "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," a new documentary from Alex Gibney, who made last year's "Taxi to the Dark Side."

The movie is pretty much a wallow in all things Thompsonian -- you'd learn more factually about Thompson in two minutes on the Internet than in the two hours of...
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