Movie Nation

John Krasinski finds his way back on the big screen, both in front of and behind the camera, in the sentimental and sweet but obvious and sit-commie “The Hollars,” a melodrama about an amusingly dysfunctional family brought together by terminal illness.

That’s what drags son John (Krasinski) home to rural Ohio. Mom (Margo Martindale) has a brain tumor.He’s an aspiring artist and graphic novelist (comic book designer) failing in New York, about to become a father. His rich girlfriend (Anna Kendrick) is close to term.

But back home, Mom’s bad news sends Dad (Richard Jenkins) into a weepy shame spiral. Dad so badly misread Mom’s symptoms that he told her it was her weight.

“He sent me to Jenny Craig!”

Brother Ron (Sharlto Copley) is living out his own train wreck, stalking his ex-wife and two daughters, regretting the divorce ever since she (Ashley Dyke) took up with a new, better man, a handsome and tolerant youth pastor (Josh Groban) at church.

A better title for this James C. Strouse script, which Krasinski took by the horns and got made, would have been “Piling On.” Troubles pile up at John’s feet from the moment he shows up in the hospital. Dad’s HVAC business is bankrupt. Ron used to work there, but was fired, and now lives in his parents’ basement.

Mom is wondering if she wasted her life. Even Mom’s nurse has a beef with John. He, apparently, is the fellow who married and had a child with John’s ex, played by the winsome Mary Elizabeth Winstead. And Jason, played by Charlie Day at his most Charlie Day (screechy and annoying) is worried she still has a thing for John.

Which she, of course, does.

That’s a HUGE knock against “The Hollars,” its screaming obviousness. John takes a moment to collect his thoughts at the Ol’ Swimmin’ Hole. He climbs on the old tire swing, and…you know the rest.

The casting is so on-the-nose that pairing up the great pros Martindale and Jenkins has no potential for surprise, though both have moments that pay off. That on-the-nose business goes for Krasinski himself, who settles into the rhythms of “The Office,” doing the whole sweeter than/maybe smarter than his surroundings bit he did so well there.

Sit-commie.

The wildcard here is the South African Copley, who seems miscast and out of his comic depth, but who is consistently out-there and hilarious in pathetic and predictable (for the character) ways.

There’s always something to be said for a comedy that errs on the side of “heart,” and “The Hollars” has that — warm moments, a few genuine tears, a spell just starting to be cast when something silly comes up to jolt the works back into the realm of comedy.

Randall Park is pleasantly nonplussed as the doctor who has to deal with Ron’s inane “Asian” questions.

“What martial arts do you practice?”

“None.”

Jenkins has a lovely, offbeat moment of song, an established tradition in romantic comedies since time immemorial — or at least since “My Best Friend’s Wedding.”

And Kendrick shows up to amp up the pathos and throw paranoid-pregnant-woman hilarity at the looming tragedy.

It doesn’t really skip by, but Krasinski keeps the squishiness to a minimum and lets his co-stars land the laughs even if “The Hollars” are nothing to shout about.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief language and some thematic material

Cast: John Krasinski, Margo Martindale, Anna Kendrick, Richard Jenkins, Sharlto Copley, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Charlie Day, Randall Park
Credits: Directed by ,John Krasinski, script by James C. Strouse . A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 1:28

If college cinema professors aren’t teaching “The Screen Gems View of Urban Affluence and its Impact on African American Aspiration,” then somebody is seriously missing the mark.

The studio, which gets by on random horror hits and the occasional franchise (“Resident Evil”) has made glossy African American comedies (“This Christmas”, “The Wedding Ringer”), romances (“Not Easily Broken”) and thrillers (“Obsessed,””No Good Deed”) its low-risk/high-return bread and better.

The films may not have African-American directors or screenwriters, and some suffer a tone-deafness because of that. But they share a sheen, a polish and a beauty that puts Tyler Perry’s similar ambitions to shame.

“When the Bough Breaks” does for surrogate mothers what “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle” did for nannies, and does for another character what “Fatal Attraction” did for bunnies.

It’s derivative and obvious, downright risible as it portrays Screen Gems’ go-to affluent hunk, Morris Chestnut, manfully resisting the frank sexual advances of the possibly dangerous and unstable surrogate (Jaz Sinclair) he and his wife (Regina Hall) have hired to carry their “last viable embryo” to term.

But from its New Orleans mansion and penthouse office suites, to its Mercedes and parties packed with haute couture glamour, it presents a vision of African American aspiration and achievement that Hollywood generally ignores.

Something about Anna (Sinclair) and her boyfriend (Theo Rossi) gives John Taylor (Chestnut) pause. He’s a high-end corporate attorney who senses something predatory in the guy, and a little too goody-two-shoes about the young woman.

“I’ve never been able to give anybody anything!” she gushes. And chef Laura (Hall) just melts for her, heedless of the dangers in putting their last egg into somebody whose beau does too much speaking for her and seems too eager to pass himself off as her pimp in this arrangement.

John keeps his misgivings to himself to please his desperate-for-a-baby wife. And sure enough, the boyfriend beats up poor Anna, they invite Anna to stay with them and Temptation is Right Under Their Roof.

Mousy but lovely Anna va-va-vooms up with barely an effort. Even Laura notices.

“She might have a little thing for you!”

She doesn’t know the half of it.

Things follow a generally predictable path from there, with the question “What sort of game are they/Is she running here?” hanging over it all.

It’s heavily patriarchal, as the husband is the only one to see the danger and tries to “handle” the situation on his own. Sinclair makes a sexy femme fatale, but there’s nothing subtle about the character, the performance or the I’m-having-your-baby-big-boy stares.

“Can’t blame a person for staring. It just means they like what they see!”

But “When the Bough Breaks” gets the job done, even if we see this cradle rocking right out of the tree pretty much from the get go.

Deeper significance? That’s for some future college course to dissect.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for violence, sexuality/partial nudity, thematic elements, some disturbing images, and language

Cast: Morris Chestnut, Regina Hall
Credits: Directed by Jon Cassar, script by Jack OIsen. A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:47

The voice of skepticism is sorely missed in Oliver Stone’s credulous bio-pic, “Snowden.” But Stone doesn’t really do skepticism, characters playing the Devil’s Advocate, contrary voices.

He didn’t have that to impedge his groveling before Hugo Chavez in the documentary he made about the Venezuelan populist/strongman. He didn’t let facts get in the way of his grand Vast Right Wing Conspiracy epic, “J.F.K.”

So why start with “Snowden,” a hagiography celebrating the ego-tripping “moralist” who exposed the vast U.S. data-sweeping capabilities to journalists bent on embarrassing the bulwark of liberty facing down a sea of anarchy, Islamo-fascism and unreconstructed communist dictatorships?

But as lopsided as the film is, depicting the NSA/CIA contract “leaker” as the greatest friend privacy rights and freedom ever had, he makes plenty of sturdy moral arguments, the ones that allegedly drove the then-29-year old to put himself above an elected government with (supposed) checks and balances and expose the country to ridicule by its friends and subversion by its enemies.

As Snowden’s intel-mentor, drolly performed by Rhys Ifans, puts it to his new charge just as Snowden is joining the intel war, “If there is another 9/11, it’ll be your fault.”

Indeed. Snowden and his fellow bomb-throwing vandal Julian Assange 0f Wikileaks are exposing those who won’t kill them for telling their secrets, leaving the great criminal enterprises, outlaw states and murderous cyber-barbarians of every religious and Russian stripe all but untouched.

But I digress. When the filmmaker’s opening title describes the film as “dramatized” from actual events, not even bothering with “Based on the true story” or “inspired by the true story,” you have to wonder what you can believe. And based on Stone’s and Snowden’s record of spin, it all starts to play like agitprop — a $4 word best abbreviated as “B.S.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt dons glasses and cleverly colors his voice into Snowden’s tech savant drone, portraying a patriotic soldier unfit for the Special Forces job he craved, but who finds his niche in Sig-Int, Signals Intelligence. He’s a self-taught programmer/hacker/decoder who dazzles his mentors (Ifans and Nicolas Cage) and supervisors, earning promotions and more and more prominent postings.

Shailene Woodley is the leftist girlfriend the young conservative bickers with and loves. Shailene is a smart actress who relishes any role that lets her play a full-fledged adult, so naturally there’s a nude love scene.

Zachary Quinto is crusading paranoid (perhaps with cause) journalist Glenn Greenwald, Melissa Leo is the documentary filmmaker who joined Snowden, Greenwald and a veteran British newspaper reporter (Tom Wilkinson) in a Hong Kong hotel room where they schemed to unleash the story of this vast data gathering operation on the world.

Cell phone and Internet companies turning over tracking data, backdoor entryways and bulk email and phone records to the USA, sweeping sweeps of personal records that span the globe and the US, it was all news to us. Computer cameras activated by remote control, real-time observing of often innocent people who might have three, four or five degrees of separation from someone with ties to illicit activity.

Good stuff, important to get out there. But…Except, well, maybe a lot of people figured their electronic footprint was no place for privacy. And in a war with ruthless cyber-states like China, North Korea and the hacking haven of Russia, well, who is naive enough to think there won’t be excesses?

“Most Americans don’t want freedom,” Ifans, this film’s version of the all-knowing/all-pontificating Donald Sutherland spook of “J.F.K.,” intones. “They want security.” Here’s another, delivered as he is literally and hilariously made to embody Big Brother (on a giant TV screen), “Secrecy is security, and security is victory!”

Well, sure. And if the film makes the case that this is a conversation we’ve avoided having and shouldn’t avoid, bravo Oliver Stone. But he’s not content there, no. This is a Snowden of pure heart, purer motives, purer still methods — he goes out of his way to leave a “trail” so that his Intel colleagues won’t be implicated in his espionage. It’s hagiography.

This is “Snow White” (a colleague’s nickname for him, or was it?) Snowden, not the self-satisfied, morally superior attention whore who would rather flee, with the aid of China, to Russia on his way to Ecuador, rather than face the music and force this debate in open court. You know, the Snowden we’ve seen on TV, interviewed freely by all media comers.

The film presents the various waypoints of Snowden’s career, the ways he picked up intel outside of his paygrade, his rising paranoia that he and he alone has put the whole nefarious picture together in his head, and his difficulty keeping his free spirit lady love from posting nude self-portraits on her hard drive.

Yes, “Terrorism is the excuse” for everything he found a threat to our liberties — the judge, jury and executioner drone strikes driven by simple suspicious cell-phone numbers (according to Snowden), the spying on businesses, governments, looking for vulnerabilities to exploit.

Perhaps America would be safer had Snowden just read a few good spy novels to understand the moral grey area of all of this sort of work. It’s not pretty, and he’s not Jesus Christ on a Laptop.

The over-arching accusations — some of which have been borne out, others discounted utterly — the suspicion he applied to everyone and everything — UNTIL he meets some journalists of various stripes, whom he instantly tells “I TRUST you” — the patriotic kid whose patriotism turned from conservative combat ambitions to “saving” us from our intel state tyranny — it’s all just too hard to swallow, even if Stone, as usual, shoves it down our throats.

And only Oliver Stone would insist that we do — swallow it — without bothering to chew over the facts first.

MPAA Rating:R for language and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifans, Zachary Quinto, Melissa Leo, Tom Wilkinson, Joely Richardson, Timothy Olyphant,
Credits: Directed by Oliver Stone, script by Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone. An Open Road release.

Running time: 2:08

Travis a thirtyish musician cobbling together a living in New York, playing jingles, interviewing folks on the street about their toothpaste.

But the wedding of an ex-girlfriend has him taking stock.

“I’ve been thinking I need to make some changes.”

To him, that means brushing off the girlfriend (Britne Oldford) he’s been keeping at arm’s length. And it means starting an affair with an older married wedding guest he’s just met. That’s “How He Fell in Love.”

But this realistic romantic drama by writer-director Marc Meyers is more about process than result, more about the journey than the destination.

Matt McGorry (“How to Get Away With Murder,” “Orange is the New Black”) makes Travis a hunky, amoral heel who takes Ellen’s business card in a shared ride into the city. He shows up at her yoga class, and takes to heart her instructions there.

“Yoga will open you up, emotionally and physically.”

He picks up on her distance from her ever-absent older husband (Mark Blum). And Ellen (Amy Hargreaves of “Homeland”) sends all the right signals, but with subtlety — eye contact here, a cute gesture there. The texting starts, then “meet up for a movie,” then hotels.

Everything in the film progresses through the classic “New York Affair” waypoints, leading to the “weekend away.” Much of what Travis does is stereotypical “musician as yard dog” behavior — amoral, greedy, narcissistic. But while McGorry doesn’t let the guy live beyond judgement, he lets us believe there’s no real malevolence here. The narcissism plays out in more understated ways — how he takes advantage of a friend and co-worker’s generosity, his casual dismissal and re-connection with the beautiful, high-strung ex-girlfriend.

He’s a heel, but a sensitive, self-aware one.

Hargreaves embraces Ellen’s feeling of liberation, but liberation with limits. She’s tumbling into this with open eyes, but hoping not to risk the parts of her life that comfort her — the luxury and freedom that marrying a wealthy older man provides.

Oldford sparks as a young woman trying to push/pull a reluctant lover to the next level, and veteran character actor Mark Blum has the best scenes as the cuckolded husband mature enough to see what’s going on, maybe even mature enough to stop it.

“How He Fell in Love” isn’t dazzling, warm and fuzzy. For all the damage being done, there’s not a lot of harsh edge to it, either. But it feels real, like something that could happen and probably does for a whole smorgasbord of reasons, many of them revealed here. It’s low-budget nature adds credibility and gravitas, and its over-explained life lessons feel earned, not imposed on it by a script that never overreaches.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity

Cast: Matt McGorry, Amy Hargreaves, Mark Blum
Credits: Written and directed by Marc Meyers. A Monument release.

Running time: 1:47

The voices hiss off the cassette tapes, Cold War moments frozen in time.

Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok can be heard on them. His actress-wife, Choi Eun-hee made the recordings, and is heard as well.

But the star, the riveting presence that makes this element of the documentary “The Lovers and the Despot” so compelling? It’s North Korea’s playboy dictator Kim Jung-il, son of Kim Il-sung, father of Kim Jung-un. He’s laughing and joking and talking up big movie-making plans.

And he’s admitting, on tape recordings made without his knowledge, that he had the then-divorced first couple of South Korean cinema kidnapped and brought to him so that he could turn North Korean cinema into the envy of the world, lauded at film festivals, spreading the message of communism and the Kim Family Dynasty.

“The Lovers and the Despot” is a tale worthy of a hundred Cold War thrillers. A divorced actress on the backside of fame, lured to Hong Kong and kidnapped — drugged, hustled into a speed boat and onto a waiting freighter for the long trip to Pyongyang. We’ve all seen that James Bond movie.

Her director/ex-husband, out of favor with the South Korean regime at the time, losing his studio, going to Hong Kong to track down the missing ex-wife, and disappearing himself. Did he defect? Did he plan the whole thing? Movie people have been known to make deals with the devil to get work.

Years in prisons, years making lavish movies for the not-yet-in-power Dear Leader, accusations of treason, questioned motives and escape plots which involve those Heroes of Global Culture — film critics — all packed into this Made for Hollywood Blockbuster story.

BBC filmmakers Ross Adam and Robert Cannan built the documentary around those tapes, and extensive interviews with Choi, U.S. intelligence and State Dept. officials, Hong Kong police officers, relatives and colleagues. They generously sample the films of Shin, Choi, and North Korea propaganda fare, including the films the couple made under state supervision while there.

Cannan and Adam have created a classic Cold War documentary, with spycraft and intrigues and prisons and secret recordings, a tiny peek inside the secretive police state and its megalomaniacal ruling family.

And thanks to those tapes, the first ever to reach the West of the future Dear Leader’s voice, we come to understand what North Korea’s cloistered rulers really want — to make movies.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence discussed

Cast: Choi Eun-hee, the voices of Shin Sang-ok, Kim Jung-il
Credits: Directed by Ross Adam, Robert Cannan, script by . A release.

Running time: 1:38

Saturday didn’t save the French kids’ cartoon “The Wild Life.” A lifeless “Robinson Crusoe” adaptation with nary a laugh in it — nicely animated, but still — won’t even open to $3 million, which is beneath “bomb.” Pity they didn’t spend a cent on casting up and joking up the English language version.

“Don’t Breathe” finishes the weekend over $66 million, destined to come close to $80, when every ticket has sold.

“Sully,” the weekend winner from Warners’? It had a good Saturday to go with a beefy Friday night, and should clear $35 million if Sunday’s numbers are healthy. Older audience for Clint and Tom movies, so Sunday could be a good day.

“When the Bough Breaks,” an African-American cast thriller, may clear $15 with a big Sunday, which past performance suggests is a big day for this audience to show up.

“The Disappointments Room” is a bomb, dumped on the first weekend of the fall film season to little effect.

So Tom Hanks still has an audience. Clint Eastwood’s name in the director’s credit has renewed punch, thanks to “American Sniper.”

And “Sully” is the first break-out hit of the fall, opening to an estimated $30 million this weekend. 

That’s not top dollar for either of them, but for both, it’s a sign that their audience hasn’t aged entirely out of going to the movies. Good reviews and a familiar story helped “Sully” pay off, too. Warner Brothers hopes to get a few more movies out of Eastwood before he, like Altman and Lean, Huston and perhaps Woody Allen, has to show up with an oxygen tank on set.

Screen Gems has a niche with African American cast thrillers, and “When the Bough Breaks” is delivering to the tune of $14 million or $15, depending on Saturday. Friday night was big. Better marketing, preview screenings and reviews, would have helped.

“The Wild Life” animated flop needs a huge Saturday to reach “disappointing.” It won’t even crack $5 million. They needed to cast bigger English language speaking voices, hire an English speaking joke writer or three (it was a French film) and give it the familiar title, “Robinson Crusoe” or “Crusoe and Friends.” Whole lot of blunders evident on a flop this big. Good reviews aren’t a guarantee of a hit (See “Kubo and the Two Strings”). They would have helped this one, and they were terrible. 

Nothing else new, not the horror pic “The Disappointments Room,” nada, cracked the top ten.

Building a musical around an English neighborhood where five prostitutes were murdered is no slam-dunk of an idea, I don’t care what “Sweeney Todd” would say.

But, hey, Tom Hardy SINGS in “London Road,” a BBC Films production based on the stage musical. Who wouldn’t pay to hear that?

“London Road” is a street in Ipswich where five young working women were murdered in a very short period of time in 2006. That makes the crime look like more of a spree killer’s work than that of a serial killer. The play, and now the film, is built on the testimony gathered from the residents there in interviews, conversations that an opening title insists is “what they said exactly as they said it.”

Some liberties were taken with location and repetition, to turn statements into song and stage those songs in a pub, in a garden, on a bus or in assorted living rooms. But the idea is to show the locals as they really are, or were — frightened, annoyed, narrow-minded and judgmental.

The neighborhood, they insist, was only overrun with hookers after upgrades to the local football stadium. Street walkers flagging down cars, sex in alleyways, threats of violence if you called the coppers.

These “foul-mouthed slags” had it coming, several say.

Suspicions turn neighbor against neighbor. Smart-mouthed schoolgirls chirp “You auuuuuto-matically think…It could be HIM!…Is it him? Is it him? Is it HIM?”

Hardy, playing a serial-killer obsessed taxi driver, puts off one and all with his knowledge and theories.

The music uses minor chords and dark tones (very “Sweeney Todd”) and the singing is somewhat amateurish (not just Hardy’s). Not a single tune in it will stay in your head 30 seconds after it’s over.

Olivia Colman is a staple of British TV, not the pop charts. She plays Julia, very representative of the neighborhood’s views and someone willing to organize those who live around her as the cops overrun the place and the TV talking heads, doing their vapid, sing-songy stand-ups (a hoot) give the place a bad rap.

Kate Fleetwood stands out as a surviving street-walker convinced to give up the life by the crimes, the police, social services and neighborhood stigmatization.

We don’t meet the victims, or the accused killer (mercifully). But there is blood in the water when that suspect is arrested, a gleeful, choral rush to judgment.

I can’t say it all works, and there’s an epilogue that plays as more insipid than biting. But it’s a daring piece to put on the stage, even more daring to commit to film.

And if nothing else, the title is easy for tourists to remember as a place to avoid when visiting The Old Country.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, adult subject matter, offscreen violence, profanity

Cast: Olivia Colman, Tom Hardy, Anita Dobson, Kate Fleetwood, James Doherty

Credits: Directed by Rufus Norris, script by Alaecky Blythe, based on her London stage musical. A BBC Films release.

Running time: 1:31

You don’t have to remember the 1943 mid-WWII Oscar winning “The Human Comedy” to realize that Meg Ryan’s version, “Ithaca,” is missing something.

Sentimental and slow, this “Life on the Homefront” melodrama lacks the pathos and punch of its predecessor. And without those, a cast of name actors who did director Ryan a favor (Tom Hanks, Sam Shepard, Hamish Linklater) and the generous sprinkling of William Saroyan aphorisms and period-perfect setting lacks purpose or a reason for being made.

Homer Macaulay (Alex Neustaedter) is a 14 year-old ready to start his work life as a telegraph office delivery boy in 1942. His older brother Marcus (Jack Quaid, son of Dennis and Meg) is in the Army and about to ship out.

He’s got a much younger brother, Odysseus, and an older sister, Bess. Mom (Ryan) is carrying on and carrying grief in her every gesture. Her husband, Homer’s dad (Hanks) has recently passed. She still sees him in her more trying moments.

Homer works for the kindly office manager (Hamish Linklater) and an elderly lush of a telegraph operator (Sam Shepard). As he races to beat Western Union on every delivery, Homer sees the sadness and wrenching change of war, up close. He delivers “The Secretary of War regrets to inform you” notices to the families of the missing or killed.

But his brother writes him thoughtful, philosophical and fatherly letters about “this wonderful, senseless yet beautiful world.” The boss, Tom (Linklater) offers “The best part of a good man stays,” as an explanation of untimely unjust death.

And Mom has a few thoughts of her own, that “There will always be pain in this world…A good man will seek to take the pain out of things.”

Young Neustaedter (TV’s “The Colony”) is properly sensitive, but dull in a part that seems dulled down by the intervening decades. Mickey Rooney played the kid in 1943, and gave him more of that antic spark of life that the world has to beat out of him.

Ryan so underplays the ongoing grief that her character never once rises to “touching,” something she’s been famous for achieving all through her career.

In the rest of the cast, only Shepard stands out, a sauced sage who dodges the “death” question from the kid with a weary wit.

“That’s a very young question, and I’m an old man.”

Frequent collaborators Ryan and Hanks have just a couple of scenes together, only one with dialogue.

Richmond, Va. and environs ably substitutes for WWII inland California, and Ryan inventively gets around the movie’s military requirements by having letter-writing scenes set on board a train, or in a bunk. Battles are fought in the dark.

But even if this wasn’t a period piece, it would feel exhausted, dull and dated. The world has grown up a lot since WWII, grown more cynical. A wise barkeep (Scott Shepherd) can deliver his world-weary appraisal of the human race — “The fightin’s inside us. It’s what we are…till we ain’t.”

There’s just no way to make that sentiment, novel for its time, new to anyone hearing it today.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, a war image, and smoking

Cast: Alex Neustaedter, Hamish Linklater, Sam Shepard, Jack Quaid, Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks
Credits: Directed by Meg Ryan, script by Erik Jendresen, based on the novel “The Human Comedy” by William Saroyan. A Momentum/eOne release.

Running time: 1:33

JT LeRoy was literature’s most “unreliable narrator.” An invented writer with a lurid, invented past and a talent appreciated mostly because of that fabrication, Jeremy “Terminator” LeRoy fooled the supposedly hip New York literary scene, and movie stars, rock stars, and famous filmmakers who came into “her” orbit in the late 1990s.

Because this 19 year-old West Virginia street hustler/heroin addict/AIDS suffering Street Lit phenom was actually an obese 30something Brooklynite who wrote in that voice, who curried favor with famous writers and agents, always by phone and fax, and with their gullible help made herself famous and at least rich enough to pay for gastric bypass surgery.

“Author: The JT LeRoy Story” lets LeRoy, aka Laura Albert, and a few of those who worked with her reveal how she did it. Some of that is the truth. Her motives, her murky early history? An abused childhood, institutionalization? That’s more suspect.

Because in the present-day interviews filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig did with her, and the decades of recorded and archived phone conversations with everyone from Billy Corgan and Courtney Love to Gus Van Sant and Michael Pitt, she-speaking-as-JT spins yarns.

It’s hard not to believe that very word coming of her mouth is a lie. And once the hoax added a cute public face for LeRoy — that of her boyfriend’s pixie-ish sister, Savannah Knoop — you wonder how any of these New York/Hollywood “sophisticates” could have been so stupid. I remember the first magazine profile I read of LeRoy, and I wasn’t fooled. Even in wig and glasses, Knoop was obviously no “Southern Gothic boy girl,” especially not a heroin addicted one who wanted to be a girl.

Feuerzeig makes the fateful choice of telling the whole story through Albert’s eyes, and decked out in too-old-for-this leather and straightened hair and piercings, she conjures up a hellish life — raped at 3, fat because her molester preferred her thin, abandoned by her parents.

And the filmmaker does nothing to verify any of this. As all fiction writers are by definition, liars, he kind of was obligated to at least try.

Albert was a lifelong phone-calling role player, adapting accents (British, West Virginia, also obviously fake) to call suicide hotlines and eventually a San Francisco shrink who urged her to write as a means of coping with her anxieties. “Terminator” was born, and eventually in fringe magazines, under the guise of a short memoir essays of a 13 year-old hustler.

That got her phone numbers of her favorite writers — Bruce Benderson (“User”) and Dennis Cooper (“Try”). Next thing you know, her writing is in the hands of an agent and publishers, and Terminator has morphed into “JT LeRoy.” With “Sarah,” JT was a literary star, “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things” ensured the movies would come courting, that he’d end up backstage at concerts, that he’d hear “The Bono Talk,” about not letting success keep him — her — from staying “true to yourself.”

Doing interviews only by phone, JT’s mystery and allure grew. Some were suspicious from the start. But as the movie accidentally makes obvious, JT was someone that scene and those people wanted to believe — son of a West Virginia “lot lizard,” a truck-stop hooker, on the streets, servicing Johns in his tweens, on heroin and infected with AIDS by his teens.

Want to prey on New York prejudices? Play a grotesque parody of assorted Southern stereotypes.

The tape-recorded phone calls — with director Van Sant, Smashing Pumpkin Corgan, Courtney Love and actress/director Asia Argento — never stop feeling like the violations they are. But did Feuerzeig even try to get Winona Ryder, Tom Waits or anybody (other than Cooper and Benderson and her agent) to speak to how they felt after the hoax was revealed?

Feuerzeig gets Albert to talk about the role-playing she settled into early on, passing herself off as a British punk to land her first serious boyfriend, adapting voices and guises to anybody she got on the phone.

The logistics of the visual hustle are scantily covered (despite the movie’s two-hour running time) and are absurdly elaborate. Finding an “avatar,” was easy. Did Albert drill her on the writing? That young Ms. Knoop was able to “play” LeRoy to everyone’s satisfaction reinforces the sense that there’s no gullible rube like a famous one, a New York literary one. And Albert, playing first a British friend and “manager” to JT and then, transformed again into a musician-pal, had a front row seat to the circus she created.

If Oprah could be suckered by James Frey (“A Million Little Pieces”) and if an Alabama racist can secretly write about “his” Cherokee childhood, and get away with it for decades (“The Education of Little Tree”), if failed writer Richard Patrick Russ could abandon a life, a wife and children and reinvent himself as the sailing scion of Irish gentility Patrick O’Brian (“Master and Commander”), you’d think the literary world would be on its guard.

It wasn’t, and probably still isn’t.

Albert? The avatar-creating literary lioness of modest talents was just giving that world what they wanted. Her only crime might have been that she was ahead of her time.

MPAA Rating:R for language throughout, sexual content, some drug material and violent images

Cast: Laura Albert, Winona Ryder, Billy Corgan, Bruce Benderson ,Dennis Cooper
Credits: Directed by Jeff Feuerzeig.  A Magnolia/Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:50