★★★ 119 mins ALTHOUGH director Alex Gibney “shaped” the screen story, every narrated word in this film biography comes from the typewriter of its subject, one of America’s most influential writers and rebels, Hunter S Thompson.

His classic, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, was filmed by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam with Johnny Depp starring – and Depp narrates this endlessly fascianting documentary.

Thompson was called America’s greatest comic writer by Tom Wolfe and when Rolling Stone magazine, where he began his career, devoted an entire issue to him after his death by gunshot, it became the best-selling edition in its history.

Gibney’s remarkable, although arguably overlong, film portrait is the result of two years work during which time he had access to photographs and over 200 hours of audiotapes, home movies and documentary footage of the man.

Friends and family also cooperated with the project to produce a fully-rounded picture of a man whose funeral was as spectacular and off the wall as his life. His ashes were fired from a rocket launcher mounted in a towering two-thumbed fist, whose palm held a giant button of peyote.

As well as a week-long run for Gonzo, Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema has a special screening of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas on Monday at 8.30pm.