BRUCE Robinson’s film adapting a novel by Hunter S Thompson invites film-goers to read between its lines without making any convincing new arguments about binge drinking, Puerto Rican poverty, the high life, cock fighting, friendship and drugs.

It’s a fun movie flowing undemandingly through a story about Paul (Johnny Depp), writer of 2½ unpublished novels, joining the “San Juan Post” where the acerbic editor (Richard Jenkins) assigns him to local news and the horoscope. Reporters warn him of the paper’s dismal business situation, introduce him to staff photographer Sala (Michael Rispoli) and urge him to avoid Moberg (Giovanni Ribisi) who writes crime and religion and whose body would stop working if he stopped pouring alcohol into it.

PR flack Sanderson (Aaron Eckhard) asks Paul to publicise a land speculation on an island the US Navy uses for gunnery practice. Sanderson has winsome Chenault (Amber Heard) in his thrall, a flash yacht, scheming business associates, a red Austin Healy to die for but no visible morality.

The cast does a great job delivering a story with much humour and just enough low-level tension to keep the film from getting flabby. Much rum and beer gets drunk, much tobacco gets puffed; heck, man, it’s 1960 and smoking is the done thing.

Ignore the titles before the end credits about Paul and Chenault marrying and Paul becoming a famous writer. They’re fabrications that Thompson, the founder of Gonzo journalism, might have thought meritorious.

At all cinemas