Famed "gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson was called a lot of things. Drug-addled was one. Freak was another. But in a new documentary directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, the late Thompson is called something else.

A patriot.

Gibney's "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," which will screen Saturday as part of the OjaiDocs'08 series, is a nostalgic tribute to Thompson's subversive, hilarious voice, whose absence is particularly felt in an era when many in the mass media lack the spine to challenge political leaders. Gibney will be on hand to answer questions about the film after the screening at the Ojai Playhouse theatre.

"Gonzo" isn't all glowing. As the film makes clear, Thompson, who was 67 when he shot himself to death in 2005, lapsed into drugged-out caricature in his later years. Or, as his contemporary Tom Wolfe puts it in the film, "He got trapped in gonzo."

Narrated by Johnny Depp, the 118-minute "Gonzo" is illustrated with tons of archival photos and video and is chock-full of interviews — with conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, former President Jimmy Carter, Thompson's artistic co-conspirator Ralph Steadman, the writer's two wives and son, and many others. The movie focuses on Thompson's most creatively fertile period, 1965-75, when he cranked out books on the Hells Angels and the 1972 presidential campaign, wrote "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and ingested the contents of several pharmacies.

Is that the stuff of patriots?

"He was a patriot in the best sense of the word," Gibney said. "Not a kind of obey-authority follower, but somebody who embraced the essence of the American character, and I think he understood the American character better than most.

"What's that old expression? America, love it or leave it. It doesn't mean agreeing with everything your elected government does. He loved it for everything — both for the worst it represented and the best."

The film lingers on a period in 1970, when Thompson ran for sheriff of Colorado's Pitkin County (home of Aspen) on a "Freak Power" ticket. Gibney said Thompson "must have done it at first as a joke." Among his campaign promises: not to take mescaline while patrolling. "But I think he got into it. By the end, I think he felt, We came close. We almost won.' There was another aspect of him, playing a role at the center of this drama he was creating, and the fiction almost became a reality."

But Thompson also was making a point that perhaps the United States was a bit more radical than many thought during Richard Nixon's "law and order" first presidential term. Gibney also uses Thompson's prescient screeds to link Nixon-era America to Bush-era America.

Most chilling: The film opens with a piece Thompson wrote for ESPN.com on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, in which Thompson predicts the civil-liberties incursions and religious warmongering that followed the terrorist attacks.

"I didn't know what we'd find when we were back there (to the late 1960s), but what we found was this eerie similarity between the conflict over the Vietnam War and the conflict over the Iraq war," Gibney said. "There's a character flaw American policymakers seemed to have — believing that with a right application of force and a misplaced idealism, you can change the world and make it do what you want it to do."

Both Nixon and Bush, Gibney said, "appeal to that aspect of the American electorate that Hunter Thompson understood: fear and loathing. People who are angry. Bush has that ability to manipulate the dark corners of the American id. People who feel they have been displaced, overlooked. Even though his economic policy rudders against them, he manipulates their anger and their fear in ways that don't represent their best possibility. And so, too, did Nixon. He was great at that. Compared to Bush, Nixon looks like an Athenian statesman."

This approach to Thompson connects "Gonzo" to Gibney's other documentaries on the excesses and foibles of the Bush era: "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (2005) and this year's Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side" and Oscar-nominated "No End in Sight" (he was executive producer of the latter).

So when producers — including Vanity Fair publisher Graydon Carter — approached Gibney with the idea of a film about Thompson, he chose to focus on an era when a journalist not only challenged the status quo but also redefined what it meant to be a journalist.

"One of the things about gonzo journalism was it was a blend of straight reporting and outright fantasy. So we felt pretty empowered to go wherever it seemed to make sense, in an intuitive way," Gibney said.

To see a trailer for the movie, go to http://www.huntersthompsonmovie.com.