Author: The JT LeRoy Story
Directed by: Jeff Feuerzeig
Written by: Jeff Feuerzeig
Documentary - 110 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 13 Sep 2016
Written by: Jeff Feuerzeig
Documentary - 110 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 13 Sep 2016
Feel like playing judge and jury? Well, step right up to cast judgement on one Laura Albert aka JT LeRoy. A decade ago, reclusive literary darling JT LeRoy, a young, HIV-positive, gender-confused boy with a horrific past of truck stop tricks and abuse was exposed as a straight, non-HIV positive, middle-aged woman. The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and a dozen other exposés tore Ms. Albert apart for the deception. In director Jeff Feuerzeig’s Author: The JT LeRoy Story, Laura Albert gets her day in court to explain the other side of the story. Was the whole episode art? Was it an accident? Or was it a scheme for riches and celebrity mockery? You decide.
One could easily fill up a pro and con list concerning Laura’s motives and things which could have been done far more honestly. There appears to be slivers of truth when Laura says JT LeRoy’s creation was a creative expression, that he was a therapeutic outlet for her to express herself and study some inner demons. What is more suspect is why she entered into book contracts and movie options as the boy and involved an extended family network to advance the lie.
One could easily fill up a pro and con list concerning Laura’s motives and things which could have been done far more honestly. There appears to be slivers of truth when Laura says JT LeRoy’s creation was a creative expression, that he was a therapeutic outlet for her to express herself and study some inner demons. What is more suspect is why she entered into book contracts and movie options as the boy and involved an extended family network to advance the lie.
Staring directly into Feuerzeig’s camera, Laura Albert emphatically gestures with her hands and verbally inflects how the whole drama got away from her by itself before the house of cards collapsed. Nobody has ever heard the whole version from her side before as“no comment” was the standard refrain when the story broke in 2006. Underneath Laura’s bubbly and evocative surface, however, appears to be a layer of mental confusion. Insanity is too harsh a word, but episodes in Laura’s past reference her later escapades.
Institutionalized multiple times in her childhood, Laura was never exposed to her fictional truck stop life, but was certainly impacted by the early exposure to regimented therapy. Using her prolific journal entries and short stories as source material, Laura, a gifted writer, spun convincing tales about a young boy growing up under the distracted eye of a truck stop prostitute whose precarious lifestyle shattered a boy’s childhood and inflicting unknowable trauma on his psyche.
Writing under the pen name JT LeRoy, a name lifted from one of her phone sex clients, Laura wrote two international bestsellers about JT’s alleged past which were quickly given rave reviews in periodicals and championed by an unusual amount of celebrities. We see Winona Ryder introduce a fake JT at a book reading, Bono takes time to instruct JT about show business, and Courtney Love and Billy Corgan strike up phone relationships with JT to sympathize with him.
Writing under the pen name JT LeRoy, a name lifted from one of her phone sex clients, Laura wrote two international bestsellers about JT’s alleged past which were quickly given rave reviews in periodicals and championed by an unusual amount of celebrities. We see Winona Ryder introduce a fake JT at a book reading, Bono takes time to instruct JT about show business, and Courtney Love and Billy Corgan strike up phone relationships with JT to sympathize with him.
We hear just about all of these conversations with the musicians, actors, and therapists because Laura recorded all of them on cassettes. She hoarded every memorabilia scrap she could about not only her own life, but JT’s as well, constructing an archive of photo albums, notebooks, and 8mm home movies. Further enhancing the audience’s visual experience, Feuerzeig, who used a similar tactic in his 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, employed two artists to create animations around the action on screen to illustrate Laura’s point of view. Joshua Mulligan visually interprets JT’s more famous short stories and Stefan Nadelman, the artist behind 2015’s Cobain: Montage of Heck’s animations, created Laura’s notebook pieces and doodles.
None of the celebrities show up for a formal interview most likely embarrassed they were duped, but interestingly, the authors JT interacted with are more than willing to come forward. Bruce Benderson and Dennis Cooper, two writers Laura contacted as JT to express her admiration, explain how JT’s writing was fresh and should find its audience. JT’s manager and book editor also show up but it is never made clear how much they did or did not know about the situation.
Jeff Feuerzeig employs the same technique Errol Morris used in The Fog of War with Robert McNamara and The Unknown Known with Donald Rumsfeld. The subject stares directly into the camera hardly ever breaking eye contact. This method overtly gives Laura Albert center stage to take the narrative where she wants it to go. It neither comes across as a puff piece nor a blame game, but there are a lot of excuses. As it usually does, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. There is much to enjoy sitting back and listening to an amusing, shocking, and sometimes awkward story about deceiving a global audience. Is it true? Does it matter?
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