The strange truth behind the fiction
Author: The J T LeRoy Story 15 Cert, 110min
Dir Jeff Feuerzeig Starring Laura Albert, Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper
You could hardly dream up a more perfect millennial literary it-boy than J T LeRoy. The transgendered hustler offspring of a West Virginian truck-stop prostitute, LeRoy flashed to fame in 2000 with the publication of Laura, a hyperreal semi-autobiographical novel about… well, see above. A collection of short stories, The Heart Is Deceitful Among All Things, followed the next year, all of which were narrated by “Jeremiah” – another character heavily based on the author’s tumultuous life. LeRoy won an instant, sizeable and glamorous cult following, including Madonna, Tom Waits and Lou Reed. There was just one hitch: this elusive rogue writer was, in fact, Laura Albert, a 30-something mother of one from Brooklyn. For once, fiction turned out to be stranger than truth.
Or did it? Albert’s own life story – of a bizarre and ramshackle hoax that took in publishers, celebrities and the entire literary establishment for six years – is itself a jaw-dropper and a mind-popper. For one thing, the list of dramatis personae sounds virtually Pynchonian: one of Albert’s two key partners in crime, for instance, was her husband of the time, who exults in the name of Geoffrey Knoop. The other was Knoop’s sister Savannah, who played LeRoy in public, beneath huge sunglasses, a pulled-down visor and matted blond wig. Documentaries so often freewheel on the power of their shrewdly chosen subject, but director Jeff Feuerzeig ( The Devil and Daniel Johnson) keeps pedalling heroically throughout – over mountains of archive footage, taped telephone calls and first-hand reminiscences, to tell Albert’s story compellingly and sympathetically, but also with the gliding finesse of a wellturned thriller.
He sits Albert in the narrator’s seat, staring beseechingly down the barrel of the camera, and punctuates her confession with video, audio and printed hard evidence – which itself is often framed by the conspiratorial pops and clicks of analogue telephone receivers and magnetic tape decks. There is some extraordinary footage of Albert sitting in the audience at a LeRoy reading, cheerily applauding her own work, and even stranger recordings of calls between LeRoy and Courtney Love, Shirley Manson, Billy Corgan, Gus Van Sant and other A-list “confidants” with no clue they were being duped.
Albert’s own background is nowhere near as exotic as the one she invented for LeRoy, but it’s just as shocking – perhaps more so, given the dreary ordinariness of the sexual abuse, body image and mental health issues she contended with.
Above all, Feuerzeig’s film teasingly, dextrously reminds us that all art – especially the true stuff – is fake. As Albert herself shrugs at one point: “I’d just ask anyone who felt shortchanged to check the back covers. They always said ‘fiction’.”