Movie Review

★★

AUTHOR: THE JT LEROY STORY

Written and directed by Jeff Feuerzeig. Starring Laura Albert. At Kendall Square.

110 minutes. R (language throughout, sexual content, some drug material and violent images).

When is a hoax not a hoax? Who gets hurt when true-life tales of abuse turn out to be made up? If a victim becomes a celebrity, is he or she still a victim? Above all, is Laura Albert a con artist or a performance artist, and is there a line between the two?

These are some of the questions raised and left on the table in the fascinating but frustratingly murky “Author: The JT Leroy Story,’’ a documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig that’s worth seeing if only to argue with the movie and with yourself.

You remember JT Leroy, don’t you? No? How times flies. Leroy was, or seemed to be, a teenage literary prodigy who arose like a phoenix out of a childhood so harrowing as to be almost beyond belief. Gay, HIV-infected, the son of a truck-stop prostitute — a “lot lizard’’ — who abandoned and reclaimed him, Leroy wrote what were purported to be thinly fictionalized versions of his life: a 1999 novel “Sarah,’’ a short story collection from the same year called “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.’’

At first Leroy refused to appear in public, but as the works started attracting celebrity admirers — director Gus Van Sant; Billy Corgan, of Smashing Pumpkins; Lou Reed; Winona Ryder — he became a fixture on the music publicity scene, a shy blond figure behind oversize sunglasses. A baby Warhol, newly hatched.

It all came apart in late 2005 — just as Asia Argento’s film adaptation of “Heart’’ went from the festival circuit to movie theaters — first in the pages of New York magazine and then in The New York Times. The writings and, indeed, the entire JT Leroy persona were revealed to be the creations of Laura Albert, a 40-year-old Brooklyn-born woman who had been posing in public as her own invention’s British manager-friend, Speedie. The person “playing’’ Leroy at all those events was Albert’s boyfriend’s sister, Savannah Knoop. It was the literary hoax of the new millennium.

Or was it? In “Author,’’ Feuerzeig reframes the story not as a cautionary tale but as the latest salvo in early-21st century identity politics. He has as his central argument Albert herself, who’s extremely chatty and maybe just a little embarrassedabout the damage she wrought. Mostly she feels bad about duping her famous friends, although she’s not above replaying the phone calls she taped without their knowledge. For his part, Feuerzeig isn’t above including those recordings in his film, again without the celebrities’ OK. Just so you know we’re operating in an ethics-free zone here.

The documentary takes us through the saga from the inside, step by step, and it makes a pretty good case that what began for Albert as an act of self-medicating artistic therapy, adopting a persona and writing from within it, spun out of control as people in the publishing industry and beyond assumed “JT Leroy’’ was real. Albert’s mistake was never to correct the assumption and in fact carry the imposture further. Most people would call this “lying.’’ The movie itself is more interested in the sometimes panicky balancing act of personalities Albert needed to maintain the charade.

One aspect Feuerzeig fails to answer or even address: Why did this poor little nonexistent truck-stop boy attract the attention of so many celebrities? Did Leroy’s vulnerabilities truly speak to them? Or was he just a sympathetic freak-show by which they could maintain their outsider status and hipster bona fides? Not that it was going to happen, but you wish Feuerzeig had coaxed at least one of the famous and fooled in front of the camera to speak honestly to the subject.

If you bring traditional ideas of authorship and fair play to “Author,’’ you’ll probably want to spit nails at the screen. But if you can forget all that — silly notions of “truth’’ and “honesty’’ — you’ll appreciate the movie’s deadpan reverence for what Albert wrought. Her greatest art, in the end, appears to have been role-playing, and if she had to become a gifted writer to turn into someone else, to escape the self she loathed, well, what of it? Plenty of authors have hidden behind assumed names and even personalities. Should we care that Albert’s creation became an intentional charade? Feuerzeig leaves the matter up to us. He has made a failure of nerve wrapped in a posture of cool.

★★ AUTHOR: THE JT LEROY STORY

Written and directed by Jeff Feuerzeig. Starring Laura Albert. At Kendall Square. 110 minutes. R (language throughout, sexual content, some drug material and violent images).

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.