Critic Reviews

Author is a particular kind of documentary: a first-person account of the creation of a myth by its creator. As such, it poses all sorts of questions about the intersection of art, celebrity and psychological disturbance in our media culture, but it also gives us Laura Albert as a shape-shifting artist of astonishing talent, resourcefulness and originality.

Director Jeff Feuerzeig tracks Albert’s bizarre scheme in her own words, constructing a fascinating treatise on creative desire, internal grievances and fame as compelling as anything the writer herself dreamed up.

That Feuerzeig can navigate this hall of mirrors so cleanly and effectively is positively supernatural.

Feuerzeig lets us put together the puzzle pieces of Albert’s story. The film’s final five minutes — a punch to the heart — make it all clear.

Author: The JT LeRoy Story is wildly entertaining and truly stranger than fiction.

Even when the film fails to ask so many of the questions its narrative begs, Author is still a tricky, fascinating look at the strange nexus of art, artifice, and the intoxicating cult of celebrity.

Author: The JT Leroy Story, a documentary from Jeff Feuerzeig,is as truthful as it gets. Yet its content is so wildly absurd, that it plays like a work of fiction.

Author is less a run-through of one of the biggest controversies to plague the literary world in the past century, than an illuminating study of the enigmatic and driven woman behind the phenomenon.

The result is so far-fetchedly entertaining it feels like a fantasist’s fevered imaginings. Which, in a way, it is.

You may well question the worth of a documentary that so fully embraces the perspective of a narrator this unreliable, just as you may crave the reassuring conventions of a more balanced filmmaking approach. But even for those who don’t regard the notion of perfect objectivity with the wariness it deserves, there are compensatory insights in this movie’s unapologetic fascination with its subject.