Author: The JT LeRoy Story **** (2016, Laura Albert, Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper) – Movie Review

It is hard not to be really impressed by and engrossed in Jeff Feuerzeig’s meticulously researched and imaginatively presented documentary.

The unbelievable Author: The JT LeRoy Story is riveting and fascinating – and raises so many important issues. I talked about it for hours after seeing the movie last night with someone (a psychologist) who hadn’t even seen it! The psychologist unravelled the author’s psyche pretty darned accurately, I imagine. Regular film-goers are on their own and will have to make up their own minds, which, increasing]y rarely, they will have to bring along to the cinema with them.

American author Laura Albert talks freely to camera about her multiple personalitied life and fictitious literary persona as her pseudonymous alter ego, the much-younger male fictional writer JT LeRoy, played out in the real-life drama by her androgynous sister-in-law.

The boy is supposed to have an abused youth. It will come as no surprise then that Laura is drawing on her own young experiences. She says she was abused by a family friend, then started binge eating to compensate, and then was abused again at school for being fat. She has mind and body issues.

It’s hard to out out the real reality here though. The only definite truth I came away with is that Laura Albert is a brilliant creator of characters and fictions in her desperate need for attention and applause. Even so, I wondered at the end if she really exists, or is simply yet another hoax, fraud, invention, creation or whatever you want to call it.

Director Jeff Feuerzeig.

Do you remember that Woody Allen movie that purports to be a biopic of a real musician and it turns out it’s all a fake and that he never existed? Sean Penn stars as 1930s jazz guitarist Emmet Ray in Sweet and Lowdown (1999), supposedly second in fame only to Django Reinhardt, but Ray isn’t real. You can be feel a bit cheated by that. Well, that’s how you feel about all this. Laura, her partner and his sister might have been inventive literary and fiction creators but they did con a lot of people, most of them very well meaning.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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