In the decade since she was outed as the mastermind behind the onetime literary phenomenon JT LeRoy, the San Francisco-based writer Laura Albert has been called many things: fraud, disgrace, con artist, pathological liar (her own words, that last one). It's telling that in his rich and thorny new consideration of the LeRoy saga, director Jeff Feuerzeig has chosen to lead with the less damning designation of “author.”

The title refers less to Albert's much-disputed writing talents than to her creation of her own rise and fall — born of a compulsion to warp her life, her art, her traumatic past and her personal recovery into the most duplicitous and all-consuming kind of fiction.

That makes it hard to approach “Author: The JT LeRoy Story” without wondering if the film is meant to be an apology for Albert's charade, a defense of it or even an extension of it. The strength of Feuerzeig's movie is that it doesn't pretend to know the answer. 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.

Of the many versions of Laura Albert introduced in the course of “Author,” the most sympathetic is the one we glimpse in old photographs and home movies from her early life in Brooklyn, presented alongside a familiar-sounding chronicle of parental negligence and various mental health and body-image issues. It was during one of Albert's many calls to a suicide hotline, always under a fictional guise, that the imaginary 15-year-old who would come to be known as Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy emerged. Amazingly, he stuck, and — with a tenacity Albert claims to have been surprised by.

“Let ‘Terminator' write,” she decided, and the stories that poured forth in his voice colored in the lines of a truly monstrous childhood. Born to a West Virginia truck-stop prostitute, LeRoy endured cycles of poverty, sexual abuse, drug addiction, forced cross-dressing and other horrors — all of which he recounted in the sort of harsh, lyrical prose that drew acclaim and fame in literary circles and beyond.

Once LeRoy was in the world, of course, he had to be kept alive, and “Author” approaches the dizzyingly elaborate proportions of a bedroom farce as Albert recalls how she turned a nonexistent recluse into a living, breathing person — impersonated on the phone by Albert and in the flesh by her sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop.

The film's true target is the subtler fraudulence at the heart of the celebrity-driven sob-story culture that allowed JT LeRoy to thrive. Why are we such suckers for miserable-ism in entertainment, so quick to assume a link between suffering and artistic worth? Does a book identified on its cover as “fiction” gain merit or interest simply because it might be semi-autobiographical? The film supplies no direct answers, perhaps because it suspects we can guess them already.

justin.chang@latimes.com