THE RUM DIARY MOVIE

And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Thompson fans won-t be disappointed, of course, but most everyone else would be better off going to Henry Miller for that sort of thing.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

And through the whole of it, there is one febrile intelligence noticing and reporting on everything that takes place both inside and outside of himself. There are writers who, though broke, always manage to get an assignment just before their landlady evicts them. There are crazy chicks from Smith who like to undress in public. There are fights in bars and trouble with cops. The legendary Thompson manner (“Arriving half-drunk in a foreign place is hard on the nerves”) is flourished here, all right, and the typical Thompson high jinks of public misbehavior and private lewdness make up most of the story, which is more portrait than tale. Soon after arriving in San Juan, he manages to land a job at the Daily News, an English- language rag whose staff-an assortment of has-beens, mad geniuses, drunks, and spongers-would seem more at home in the Foreign Legion. Paul Kemp, the narrator, is a young New Yorker starting out as a newspaperman in Puerto Rico in the late -50s. What’s surprising is how much less compelling it is than his journalism. It’s hardly a surprise, then, to learn that Thompson has had a novel locked away in a desk drawer all these years. Making the most of a vicious wit, sharp tongue, and riotous imagination, Thompson infused his reporting-most famously, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-with a vigor and depth of personality usually associated more with novels than with newspapers, helping thereby to raise the literary status of nonfiction.

Thompson’s great achievement as a writer, of course, has been the role he played in the development of the “new journalism”of the1960s. He might as well have let it rest in peace. When Kemp is recruited by Sanderson to write favorably about his latest unsavory scheme, the journalist is presented with a choice: to use his words for the corrupt businessmen's financial benefit, or use them to take the bastards down.The original Gonzo journalist (Proud Highway, 1997, etc.) spent a sober afternoon going through his archives to find this unpublished novel (his only fiction), written at the start of his career. Sanderson, a businessman involved in shady property development deals, is one of a growing number of American entrepreneurs who are determined to convert Puerto Rico into a capitalist paradise in service of the wealthy. Adopting the rum-soaked life of the island, Paul soon becomes obsessed with Chenault (Amber Heard), the wildly attractive Connecticut-born fiancee of Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart). Tiring of the noise and madness of New York and the crushing conventions of late Eisenhower-era America, Kemp travels to the pristine island of Puerto Rico to write for a local newspaper, The San Juan Star, run by downtrodden editor Lotterman (Richard Jenkins). Thompson, 'The Rum Diary' tells the increasingly unhinged story of itinerant journalist Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp).

The rum diary