Awkward Gonzo Dennis Hopper Bio

Tom Folsom’s biography of Dennis Hopper has a conceptual-prose hook. Dropping the standard bio’s orderly alternation of sober reconstruction and anecdotal evidence, Hopper seeks to honor its subject’s outlaw panache with appropriately wild writing. Unfortunately, Folsom’s imitation-gonzo is a pallid, cliché-ridden imitation of Tom Wolfe at his most overheated. The opening introduces Hopper on a motorcycle “screaming as if stoked by hellfire.” “No earthly force could shake him from his steed, hot between his legs,” Folsom writes. There’s no natural rhythm in sentences like this, which aim for lurid pulp but fall into the flat realm of true-crime daytime-TV narration. (“The great Bel Air fire of ’61 roared up the canyon like a tsunami of flame.”)