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How should this movie be approached? As an exploitation of child abuse? As a fearless portrait of a childhood in hell? As an acting and filmmaking enterprise pushed to heroic extremes? "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" is the unrelenting story of a little boy torn away from a loving foster home at the age of 7, and subjected for years to a series of physical and psychological cruelties. There is no redemption, no surcease, and as the film ends the barbarity continues. This film made me intensely uncomfortable, but that was its intention.
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The material is drawn by short stories by JT LeRoy, whose work was widely considered to be autobiographical -- the memories of an abused boy who grew up to become a prostitute and finally spilled out all his remembered pain in thinly disguised fiction. As it turns out, the fiction was more heavily disguised than its admirers realized: "JT LeRoy" now appears to be a 40-year-old woman named Laura Albert, and when "LeRoy" appeared in public he was played by Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Albert's lover. With wigs, hats and dark glasses, Knoop succeeded in playing a man by presenting LeRoy as a man willing to be seen as a woman. There is probably another movie here somewhere, maybe "Transamerica meets James Frey."