The Rum Diary – review

Johnny Depp, who played gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson in Terry Gilliam's film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , apparently discovered the manuscript of the unpublished autobiographical novel The Rum Diary among Thompson's papers and engaged Bruce Robinson, writer-director of the cult film Withnail and I , to adapt it. The result is a lot of myth-making fun with Depp as Thompson's faux-naif 30-year-old alter ego Paul Kemp. In 1960 Kemp escapes from a stultifying Eisenhower-era New York to the corrupt American vacation island of Puerto Rico and a job on the San Juan Star , which plays along with the local land barons and caters to the dream of tourists. The film paints a colourful picture of the lazy, drunken journalists, and a frightening one of the island's venal politicians and the burgeoning activities of what Eisenhower identified in a farewell 1961 address to the nation as the "military-industrial complex". There's some splendid Front Page -style dialogue, but the movie gets serious, indeed slightly solemn, when Kemp writes an exposé of a crooked US entrepreneur but can't persuade his cynical editor (the excellent Richard Jenkins) to show a little backbone and publish it. "I don't know how to write like me," Kemp moans, but we know when he takes a boat back to the States that he's about to find his own distinctive gonzo voice and accompanying lifestyle.