Thompson would use in the years ahead-bizarre wit, mockery without end, redundant excess, supreme self-confidence, the narrative of the wounded meritorious ego, and the idiopathic anger of the righteous outlaw-were all there in his precocious imagination in San Juan. a languid and lovingly executed book that reveals its emotional depths slowly.' - Salon, 'The tools Hunter S. Caution: this may leave you hankering for a little cynical, subversive bile.' A remarkably full and mature first novel. But that unassailable, unshakaeble, unruffled charisma does make him hard to buy as a man on his uppers. He looks in better shape than men half his age. And you have to ask if Depp – at 48 – is a fraction too old to play 30. But, like Thompson without gonzo, ‘The Rum Diary’ is directionless and a little lacking in tone. It’s funny as hell in places and touchingly warm. The story is stoked by a run-in with a corrupt property developer (Aaron Eckhart) and his distractingly gorgeous girlfriend (Amber Heard). How does Kemp find his writing style? Dropping acid for the first time lights the fire. This is Thompson before he invented gonzo journalism – that frenzy of non-fiction-fiction he aimed at those he believed to be crooks and imposters. I don’t know how to write like me,’ he complains. Depp plays Thompson’s alter ego (as he did in ‘Fear and Loathing’): Paul Kemp, a failed 30-year-old novelist who washes up in the office of a two-bit tourist rag in Puerto Rico. Using super-strength bleach, writer/director Bruce Robinson (‘Withnail and I’) has disinfected the novel into an origins story – a kind of ‘Gonzo: The Early Years’. While it features plenty of mild, boozy havoc-wreaking, you’ll find no uppers or downers here, no rage, no cocaine, no mescaline and virtually no loss of motor skills. Oh, and why not make a film? The result is surprisingly un-addled, an affectionate, from-the-heart tribute to Thompson (who died in 2005) – though perhaps more conventional than any film associated with him has any right to be. The story goes that Johnny Depp was with Hunter S Thompson in the author’s basement rifling through boxes when he came across the manuscript of ‘The Rum Diary’ – a novel Thompson wrote in the early 1960s aged 22, fictionalising his stint on a newspaper in Puerto Rico.

The rum diary author