Johnny Depp opens one bloodshot eye and surveys a trashed hotel room that looks, as the late, great Hunter S. Thompson once put it, "like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whiskey and gorillas."

Ah yes, we're deep in Thompson territory in "The Rum Diary," a chaotic land of misfits, cynics, hustlers and drunkards. Especially drunkards. Virtually everyone in the picture is marinated in rum, beer and, in certain special cases, a 470-proof homemade hellbroth that turns those who ingest it into human blowtorches. That turns out to be a surprisingly useful side effect, and is at the flambéed heart of one of the movie's funniest scenes.

"Rum" is certainly very funny in spots, but it's also disjointed and unfocused to a point of aimlessness. Adapted and directed by British filmmaker Bruce Robinson ("Withnail and I") from a novel Thompson wrote in the early '60s but which didn't get published until 1998, "Rum" chronicles the woozy misadventures of a young gringo reporter in Puerto Rico in 1960.

The character is based on Thompson, who in fact worked as a journalist in San Juan in that year. Think of the guy as a kind of proto-Hunter, lacking the unhinged extremity found in Thompson's greatest work, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which was published in 1972 and was made into a movie starring Depp in 1998.

A fan and a friend of Thompson's, it was Depp who found the "Rum" manuscript among Thompson's papers, urged the writer to get it published and then shepherded it to the screen after Thompson committed suicide in 2005.

Depp does a great job of channeling his hero, speaking in slurry, blurry cadences that evoke the man while regarding those around him with a world-weary air. Hired by a dying paper run by a harried, cynical editor (Richard Jenkins), befriended by a sodden photographer (Michael Rispoli), and entangled with a scheming PR man (Aaron Eckhart) and his beautiful mistress (Amber Heard), Depp's character meanders through sozzled and drug-addled episodes that are occasionally interrupted by outbreaks of outrage over the exploitation of Puerto Rico by greedy developers.

The picture is all over the map, but Depp's performance is right on target as he captures the troubled spirit of his madman muse.

Soren Andersen: asoren7575@yahoo.com