At the peak of Dennis Hopper's pop celebrity, photojournalist Lawrence Schiller and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson followed the tormented director to Taos, New Mexico and recorded his tortured, daily shenanigans. Hopper was living in his "Adventure Palace," a home that had once sheltered D.H. Lawrence, madly editing The Last Movie. This eccentric documentary, eccentric in that it often stumbles self-consciously over its own subject, revels in the uncomfortable, tension-filled atmosphere surrounding Hopper's Taos digs. Wanting to expose himself, himself, as he would say, Hopper is deliberately outrageous in his philosophizing about contemporary art, Orson Welles and his own life experience, an experience tightly intertwined with sexual appetite. Hopper's explanation that he incorporates other people's "bullshit" into his films, becomes a maneuver of the documentarians as they inspire and then incorporate Hopper's "bullshit" into their film. This artifice finds its greatest expression in an ostensibly impromptu group grope, orchestrated by the film crew after a bevy of young women are flown in from Los Angeles. J. Hoberman noted, "Smitten with its own hipness, The American Dreamer is a field report on a new form of stardom, a 1970 equivalent of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, set not in Beverly Hills, but a New Mexico commune with a mystical emphasis on being 'very upfront.' " The intrigue, here, is the elusive nature of the revealed truths, the opaqueness of the subject's candid ramblings. Do we see the "real" Dennis Hopper? Or just Hopper playing himself?