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Kemp can hardly take his eyes off Cheanault, but Sanderson is looking at the big picture. He recruits the newcomer to promote a new resort, to be sited on Vieques once the U.S. Navy's use of the area for bombing range clears off any inhabitants. The plan calls for a single hotel so as to preserve the area, but that's just the start, Sanderson confidently assures Paul. Looking out over the water, Sanderson sees "an ocean of money."

Depp has already played Thompson's most famous stand-in, Raoul Duke — who lives on in "Doonesbury" — in the 1998 version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." A personal friend of the late writer, Depp happened upon the manuscript of "The Rum Diaries" when visiting Thompson's Colorado home, leading to its publication and eventual publication.

Its cover shows Thompson at the time and place, lithe and tan, sitting in a beach chair with a drink in one hand, a pen in the other and a notebook perched on his lap. The movie does not include much of his actual writing, but director Bruce Robinson ("Withnail and I") fashioned the script in his spirit. At one point, Paul confesses to Chenault that he hasn't found his voice, "I can't write like myself."

"The Rum Diary" shows Kemp finding that voice, along with a few other Thompson characters, the loyal sidekicks, the looming Sauronesque presence of Richard Nixon. Glimpsing him debating Kennedy, Paul says, "He lies like he breathes." Like Thompson's writings, though, the movie tends to veer in one direction, then another. There's an underlying earnestness beneath the mild comedy and inebriation.

When Paul tries to write about what's actually happening beyond the bowling alleys, he learns more about the world. No longer inspirational, Lotterman tells him the job is to keep a veneer between the American Dream and the truth. Since its start, the newspaper "has been on its knees before a bank," he says. Its customers, and especially its advertisers, "don't want to read about the losers, they want to know who won."

Thompson made his reputation with his account for Harper's of riding with the Hell's Angels, then covering politics and culture for Rolling Stone through the prisms of his passionate beliefs and protean consumption of alcohol and drugs. Well before the designation "lamestream" for much of the media, Thompson said, "Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long."

On the other hand, that has continued under non-objective media. But even riding the campaign trail in 1968, Thompson had no truck for the powerful few and the many who suck up to them. In a deserted newspaper plant, Kemp smells "ink and rage."

In this land of pixels and dismay, "The Rum Dairy" ebbs and flows as entertainment. But it does provide a fitting summation of Thompson's work in Kemp's declaration, "I put the bastards of the world on notice that I do not have their best interests at heart."

Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Follow on Twitter @jtyrrell87.