For his funeral, Hunter S. Thompson arranged for his ashes to be shot out of a cannon, but he had no control over the new documentary about his life, “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride,” in which he is nearly buried alive under a chorus line of celebrity admirers. Intermittently narrated by a growling Nick Nolte, who sounds as if he’s suffering from a hangover that would have challenged even Thompson’s powers of recovery, the film, which makes its premiere tonight on Starz, features an all-boys club of Hollywood hipsters — Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, Gary Busey, John Cusack, Benicio Del Toro — paying tribute to their literary idol and gonzo/macho role model.

Also heard from is Thompson’s great partner-in-crime, the Welsh artist Ralph Steadman, whose hallucinatory, ink-splattered illustrations of Thompson’s work have become so central to the journalist’s oeuvre that the movie versions — “Where the Buffalo Roam” (1980) in which Mr. Murray played Thompson, and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (1998) in which Mr. Depp did the honors — seem even more beside the point than usual: They do nothing for the texts, and they can’t hold a candle to the drawings. Unfortunately, as the documentary proceeds, ever more space is given over to scenes from both films, as if Thompson fans would prefer to watch the Depp/Murray impersonations rather than the comic genius who inspired them.

On board as well are old buddies from Thompson’s childhood, along with Tom Wolfe (who calls Thompson the greatest comic writer in English of the 20th century), William F. Buckley Jr. (who praises his “syntactical resources” and diplomatically describes him as “a complete individualist”), George McGovern, Gary Hart, Douglas Brinkley, Ed Bradley, Nick Tosches, and the film critic F.X. Feeney, among others. Thompson’s son, Juan, is also interviewed, as is his second wife, Anita, the lone female in an otherwise male cast. She and Thompson married two years before his suicide in 2005. Though she appears frequently on screen, and his first wife is shown posing in a bikini, this is a film in which women are largely invisible.

Instead we hear a lot about Thompson’s well-documented penchant for blowing things up. When Mr. Cusack came to call at the author’s home in Colorado, he was asked, “Do you hunt? Do you shoot?” (Mr. Cusack does a good imitation) before being handed a whisky, a shotgun, and a golf club before being invited to play a game of “shotgun golf.” Thompson had plenty of private land surrounding his house, which gave him free rein to indulge his anarchistic love of firearms.

Mr. Steadman, who accompanied Thompson on the alcohol- and drug-fueled journalistic expeditions enshrined in such books as “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72,” is illuminating and succinct. Thompson was a journalist, he says, for whom “there was no story until he was involved in it. He provoked a situation to get a reaction. And once he got a reaction, he knew where he was.” Thompson lived to the age of 67 (he shot himself at home on February 20, 2005), but he realized he had become trapped by his own persona long before his death. “He became a prisoner of his own cult,” as Mr. Steadman says.

The life of another cult writer, John Fante, is examined in “A Sad Flower in the Sand,” airing on PBS at the uninviting hour of 12:30 a.m., shortly after the end of “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.” Still a relatively marginal figure, Fante (1909–83), like Thompson, is a favorite of Hollywood hipsters, largely on the strength of his 1939 novel “Ask the Dust,” which was recently made into a film by “Chinatown” screenwriter Robert Towne. Surprisingly, Mr. Towne is the only Hollywood celebrity on hand to sing Fante’s praises. Did the director, Jan Louter, lose his Rolodex? Watching this film after “Buy the Ticket” is like going from a star-studded party to one where the only guests are a couple of neighbors, someone’s mother-in-law, and — weirdly — a great American screenwriter.

“Ask the Dust”and its protagonist, Arturo Bandini, a struggling young Italian-American writer in downtown Los Angeles, had a major influence on the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski, who had an influence on too many to people to mention (though Tom Waits may be the most notable example), and was portrayed by Mickey Rourke in the film “Barfly” and by Matt Dillon in this year’s “Factotum.” As we learn in the documentary, Mr. Towne originally came across the novel when he was researching his screenplay for “Chinatown.” He wanted to find out how people really spoke in the L.A. of the 1930s. “Ask the Dust” provided the answer. “It had an immediacy that just threw me back into the 1930s,”he says.”I was enthralled with it.”

“A Sad Flower in the Sand” (Fante’s characterization of Los Angeles) is a curiously desolate, almost depopulated film — a distinctly melancholy flower itself. Mr. Towne aside, there are family members (Mr. Fante’s widow and son) and a professor or two to speak on his behalf, but that’s about it. Otherwise, the most eloquent thing about this documentary is the melancholy jazz score that accompanies its archival and contemporary footage of downtown L.A.

Like Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger” (Hamsun was one of Fante’s heroes), “Ask the Dust” is a novel about an aspiring writer that casts an eternal spell on the aspiring writers who read it. But while there’s no doubting the greatness of Hamsun’s work, almost nothing in this film, including extensive quotation from his novels, convinces one that Fante was even remotely in the same league.

Rather, the impression is that Fante — by all accounts a tormented, bitter, and angry man — was a necessary myth nurtured by a certain kind of outsider L.A. wordsmith who despised both the academy and Hollywood and was in desperate need of a literary progenitor who wasn’t called Raymond Chandler. Thus Fante: the poet of Bunker Hill and patron saint of the eerie desolation of downtown L.A.

Reissued in the 1980s with a preface by Bukowski, “Ask the Dust” went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. By then Fante was a blind diabetic and double-amputee. He lived just long enough to witness the late-blooming interest in his work. But if his reputation seems overblown, this film has a quiet authenticity that taps into the eternal problem of the novel in L.A. It has its place, but — as in the great Nicholas Ray movie about a Hollywood writer — it remains a lonely one. If only Fante could have had a few of Thompson’s celebrity groupies to soften the blows of old age. He would have loved it, and Thompson had more than his fair share.

bbernhard@nysun.com