Jt Leroy - Escritor Fantasma

"The truth," said Oscar Wilde "is rarely pure and never simple." This is the case in the true story and stranger than fiction tale of Savannah, a real life avatar for the fictional author JT LeRoy. When JT writes a best seller about his life as a gender mysterious truck stop sex worker, there is intense pressure for the author to reveal himself. Savannah (Kristen Stewart) is convinced by her sister-in-law, the real author, to pose as JT. Savannah does this well, in fact too well. She plays JT for years, falls in love as JT, and the story gets to the Cannes film festival before Savannah is outed as a fraud. But JT is loved for giving people the freedom to be whoever they want and to explore the darker regions of the human experience, and such will never die. Sometimes lies are truer than the truth.

JT LeRoy is fascinating and relevant because everyone, to one extent or another, wears masks and no one is really who they say they are. The film explores how something like JT could happen, primarily with regard to Savannah, and the ramifications for the people involved. Stewart does a wonderful job in the role. Surprisingly, 90% of the film was shot in Winnipeg. Savannah and Justin Kelly attended the same Toronto international film festival showing that I did.

It's 2001 San Francisco. Savannah Knoop (Kristen Stewart) visits her brother Geoffrey Knoop (Jim Sturgess) and his wife Laura (Laura Dern). Laura writes the novel Sarah under the pen name JT LeRoy with a picture from a thrift store. It's a fictional biography of a nameless abused boy whose mother Sarah is a prostitute in West Virginia. Laura has been giving a voice to JT on the phone and now she wants to use Savannah as the physical presentation of the boy. Laura pretends to be JT's British assistant who controls his every move. Eva (Diane Kruger) is a fan taken with the mysterious JT.

I'm getting a little tired of Kristen Stewart's intense reticent. She keeps doing the same moves. Savy is not the most compelling protagonist in this story anyways. This really has to be Laura's story. The only way to place her concluding speech in any context is to show her life. Savy doesn't seem to have agency at the beginning. It doesn't make her that compelling until she starts taking charge of herself. Whenever Eva comments on their phone calls, I keep thinking that the phone calls should be done on camera. Savy is the second or third most interesting character in her own story. It's an interesting story nevertheless.

The story is interesting, but the film is not particularly engaging. Laura Dern is great in the film, as usual. The rest is pretty bland, and does not leave a lasting impression.

I had never heard of the story of JT LeRoy before watching Justin Kelly's "Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy". It's certainly a fascinating story, even if the movie never totally hits the mark in telling the story.

The strong point is the performances. Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Jim Sturgess, Diane Kruger and Kelvin Harrison put on excellent performances. I guess that if there's a problem, it's that the whole story was too much to fit in a movie; maybe it would've worked better as a miniseries.

All in all, it's not a bad movie, it just feels incomplete. I do recommend the movie, even if it never fully lives up to its potential. I'd say that in the mid-to-late 2010s, Kristen Stewart fully broke away from that vampire franchise that was nothing but an espousal of Mormon ideology.

I watched this film not knowing anything about the books of Laura Albert or the true hoax that she partnered with Savannah Knoop to create. This movie is based on Knoop's memoirs and I thought it was a layered and complex film that never seemed to work the way the filmmakers intended it to.

Laura Dern is, as usual, terrific in her role as Albert. I really like the understated acting of Kristen Stewart, as a rule, but she's just too low-key here and against the overbearing and manipulative character of Dern's it just gets annoying to watch after a while. Kelvin Harrison Jr. shines in a supporting role and Diane Kruger is excellent here as well.

As I read, there's at least 1 doc on this whole affair so I may very well check that out and compare it to the movie. Overall, I can't say exactly why but I felt there was much more to this true story than what was given to us on screen.