When Dennis Hopper first arrived in California from Dodge City, Kan., at 17, he found work at the La Jolla Playhouse. He cleaned dressing rooms \u201clike a stable boy,\u201d writes biographer Tom Folsom.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat a glamorous job that was,\u201d recalled the actor, straight-faced. He\u2019d never seen a movie star in person, and here he was \u201cactually cleaning their toilets!\u201d<\/p>\n
In the aptly haphazard \u201cHopper,\u201d Folsom makes an intermittent case for the late actor, who died in 2010 at age 74, as the embodiment of the dark side of the American dream: a Midwestern would-be cowboy who set himself up, again and again, to be shot down in Technicolor by his often-misguided ideals. The actor liked to paraphrase Kipling\u2019s poem \u201cIf\u201d: \u201cYou can treat triumph and disaster the same, because they\u2019re both impostors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Any discussion of the most notable movies of each decade would have to include \u201cRebel Without a Cause\u201d in the 1950s, \u201cEasy Rider\u201d in the \u201960s, \u201cApocalypse Now\u201d in the \u201970s, and \u201cBlue Velvet\u201d in the \u201980s. That Hopper, whose career was otherwise marked by B-movie mediocrity, appeared memorably in all four makes his story one of Hollywood\u2019s stranger legends. Folsom, the author of \u201cThe Mad Ones,\u201d a gonzo romp through the reckless Mafia career of Joey Gallo, chooses brio over minutiae in telling the actor\u2019s story, skittering from one episode to the next with little outline or structure \u2014 much as Hopper directed his classic hippie period piece \u201cEasy Rider,\u201d in seven weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cHopper\u201d by Tom Folsom.<\/p>\n
That film, with its iconic customized Harley-Davidson choppers and Peter Fonda\u2019s American flag leather jacket, was Hopper\u2019s moment. But Folsom devotes at least as much space to what followed, the actor-director\u2019s follow-up folly \u201cThe Last Movie,\u201d a scatterbrained film-within-a-film shot in Peru and edited, endlessly, in a drug-and-alcohol haze in Hopper\u2019s new compound in Taos, N.M.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was consciously using his ability as an actor \u2014 a movie man \u2014 to play the role of an artist who was going to spectacularly, gloriously, magnificently fail,\u201d writes Folsom, who draws much of his material from magazine features, TV appearances (\u201dCharlie Rose,\u201d \u201cInside the Actors Studio\u201d), and an obscure, especially strange 1971 documentary called \u201cThe American Dreamer.\u201d \u201cThe only question was: How was Hopper gonna get to his end?\u201d<\/p>\n
Hopper\u2019s obsession with James Dean, whom he supported in \u201cRebel Without a Cause,\u201d is a recurring theme, from the windup monkey he\u2019d saved from the movie\u2019s opening scene, through which he swore Dean sometimes communicated with him from the afterlife, to Hopper\u2019s Method acting in a 1955 TV show episode as a boy with epilepsy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey said my seizures were the best they\u2019d seen,\u201d he told his agent after reading for the part.<\/p>\n
Years later, he appeared opposite the other towering figure of the acting revolution, Marlon Brando, in Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s \u201cApocalypse Now.\u201d Brando \u201chated stinking Hopper,\u201d writes Folsom, \u201cthe pathetic little mutt who wanted to lick his boots.\u201d<\/p>\n
Who cared? thought Hopper, who chose to see the bunch of bananas Brando threw at him as a bouquet. After \u201cBlue Velvet,\u201d he had a bit of a renaissance, becoming a model survivor of the asylum to younger actors and artists such as Sean Penn and Julian Schnabel. (Hopper\u2019s second career as a noted photographer and collector of Pop art \u2014 the bullet holes he once put in a print by his friend Andy Warhol reportedly added to its resale value \u2014 are given short shrift here.)<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Hopper lived up to one of Hollywood\u2019s most enduring notions: He didn\u2019t give a damn.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis movies are like the Medusa head,\u201d says one fellow actor. \u201cIt\u2019s all snakes and things, but if you look at it very carefully, and it doesn\u2019t turn you to stone? It\u2019s coooool.\u201d