Author: The JT LeRoy Story

A decade on from The Devil and Daniel Johnston, documentarian Jeff Feuerzeig returns to the well of artists whose creativity flirts with oft-extreme forms of depression. With Author: The JT LeRoy Story, though, the story is based on one that had ripples beyond just the comparatively niche world of one arts scene.

JT LeRoy was a gender-fluid wunderkind who became a literary success seemingly overnight in the late 90s. Celebrity fans and eventual confidants included the likes of Billy Corgan and Gus Van Sant, while ‘his’ second novel was adapted to film by Asia Argento in 2004.

In 2005, a newspaper broke the news that LeRoy wasn’t real, but the creation of Brooklyn mother Laura Albert, who’d been posing as LeRoy’s manager under an additional fake identity; the avatar of LeRoy people thought they’d known was Albert’s sister-in-law in disguise.

Archive footage and borderline libellous recordings are peppered around a centrepiece of candid to-camera monologues from Albert, and she’s an unsurprisingly compelling storyteller, granting a tongue-in-cheek quality to support the documentary’s rollercoaster journey concerning very real emotional traumas.