What is intriguing about Justin Kelly’s “J.T. LeRoy,” from the outset, is the fact that its story is told from the perspective of its non-binary protagonist, Savannah Knoop. Which details the six-year-long scheme hatched by author Laura Albert to convince the world that her sister-in-law, Knoop, was the teenage boy secretly serving as her own literary persona.

The picture is a fascinating dissection of Albert’s psychology, drawing clear connections from the abuse she experienced as a child to her need for a young male “avatar.” Shamed by her molester into feeling like a “bad girl,” because of the momentary pleasure his abuse instinctively triggered in her, Albert was comfortable recounting her memories over a suicide hotline only in the voice of a boy, who would go by the name of “Jeremiah” or “Terminator.” Thus, J.T. LeRoy was birthed by the author as a way to give voice to her wounds, the kind that have routinely labeled men as victims and women as loose. Though the work she wrote under LeRoy’s pseudonym earned global acclaim, his consistent failure to make public appearances threatened to upend the lucrative enterprise, thus necessitating the need for Knoop. 

In order to shadow LeRoy at events, Albert inhabited the role of his British manager Speedie, a flamboyant persona spawned from the author’s stated desire to overcompensate for her weight pre-gastric-band surgery. Since Feuerzeig’s film is primarily interested in providing a platform for Albert to share her side of the story, a star-studded odyssey that resulted in outrage followed by a lawsuit, Knoop remains an enigma throughout, appearing briefly as a reluctant talking head only toward the end.

That’s why the premise of Kelly’s movie is so enticing, allowing us to view this thoroughly unorthodox partnership through Knoop’s fidgety yet unwavering gaze. Expectations are quickly subverted once Knoop, as played by Kristen Stewart, doesn’t hesitate in referring to themselves as a girl, when first pitched the masquerade by Albert (Laura Dern). Unlike in “The Wife” and “Colette,” two recent films about brilliant women who agree to ghostwrite their husband’s books, the writer and the user in “J.T. LeRoy” are one and the same. It is largely to the credit of Dern’s excellent, richly textured performance that Albert doesn’t come off as a monster, though there’s no question Knoop paints her in a less sympathetic light than the documentary did. Glossing over the particulars of the abuse endured by Albert, Knoop’s chief interest lies in exposing the manipulative games that the author utilized to wield control over her avatar. A petty adolescent one minute, a loving maternal figure the next, Dern’s Albert is a textbook study in mixed signals. 

Revealing are the glimmers of Albert’s humanity that emerge during Dern’s numerous potent monologues, especially one where she has a bout of déjà vu while visiting the film set of a LeRoy adaptation (which the author references in the Feuerzeig doc), and another delivered at a book signing where she echoes the experiences of the genderqueer community by observing, “There is no promise that we will be in sync with our designated body.” 

What this film seems to suggest is that the experience of being LeRoy was as profound a journey of self-discovery for Knoop as it was for Albert, unearthing parts of themselves that had long been buried. At a time when the long-overdue rallying cry for representation has inadvertently limited the type of stories artists have the permission to tell, depending largely on their outward identity, the success of LeRoy’s work—and the countless lives it mirrored—stands as undeniable proof that art should never be constrained by the boundaries of one’s experience. Albert did not have to be a boy in order to channel one, and the same could be said of Knoop. While fielding questions from the press, LeRoy is cross-examined by a French journalist who has doubts regarding the author’s alleged gender, and the pitch-perfect response he gives is encapsulated by the line, “I can be whomever I want to be.”