Still, there are moments when his fussy, stuffy professorial persona falls away, to reveal an achingly sincere faith in goodness.
When Buchanan offers that kind of analysis, his pugnacious junkyard-dog persona falls away and is replaced by a precision that is almost professorial.
It all tapers off a bit, though, as Rizwan's clown persona falls away in favour of self-conscious tomfoolery ("It's just stupid – what are we doing in this cabin?") and narky backchat with the crowd.
And it is to Mr. Gibney's great credit that while he pays due attention to the outsize, cartoonish celebrity persona Thompson fell back on when his literary powers began to wane, this film concentrates on the bold, innovative journalism that secured Thompson's reputation and assures his immortality.
Attempts to flesh out his gallery of personae sometimes fell flat — at the beginning, he mysteriously moved a figurine around a model of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel — but the cluttered, allusion-rich environment honored the engaging density of the composer's vision.
Attempts to flesh out his gallery of personae sometimes fell flat at the beginning, he mysteriously moved a figurine around a model of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel but the cluttered, allusion-rich environment honored the engaging density of the composer's vision.
Ms. Houghton herself plays Katya, her stage persona, who falls in love with a somewhat mysterious engineering student named Andrei Anthony Newfieldd) while visiting the Soviet Union in the summer of 1963.
She's carrying a lot of baggage from her past; she's facing a happy warrior bearing a simple, bold message that he repeats like a metronome; and she doesn't have a similarly arresting theme or a charismatic political persona to fall back on.
Gender impressionism is one of the city's contemporary forms; Monique is known on the street as Fauxnique, her female-to-male-to-female drag persona, which falls under the rubric of 'faux queen' in current San Francisco parlance.
Those thinly segmented personas can fall into each other when a partner uncovers files full of communications.
