Who is JT Leroy? Though several semi-autobiographical works of fiction are credited to him, he is not a writer so much as an author, a traumatized figure who supposedly speaks the truth about certain seamy things. The success of such an author – purportedly an HIV-positive former drug addict and male prostitute – depends on the myth of writer-as-outsider, in which the writer might as well not exist. And it turns out that JT Leroy actually does not exist.

Whom can we blame for JT Leroy? The press have fingered Laura Albert, a failed writer. The movie version of Leroy’s story, “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” however, is the work of an action star, Asia Argento, best known for her work alongside Vin Diesel.

On-screen, Leroy – called Jeremiah – is played by a little boy, whose on-screen mother, having wrested him from foster care, puts him through her paces.As Sarah, Ms.Argento (who also directs) embodies Leroy’s twisted appeal. With her thick nose and baggy eyes, Ms. Argento, more fish than pussycat, represents the latest declension of the femme fatale: vampiric, mutated, and probably sick. She serves Jeremiah pasta from a can, on a paper plate, and things go downhill from there. Jeremiah first tries to run away; Sarah ups the ante by running away with him, next time: garbage bags filled with clothes into the trunk; rent left unpaid. She gives him pills for the road, and the camera begins to swirl and twirl, just like a 7-year-old’s idea of what a high is like.

Amateurism abounds – a glockenspiel accompanies a dream sequence; morphing clouds and blurry chain-link fences signal the alienated agoraphobia of cheap social criticism. From the reheated SpaghettiOs on, the artificial accoutrements of low-class living (trailer homes, faux wood paneling, the inevitable parking lot scenes) show all that is toxic in American life. Despite having a backstory, Sarah seems to be, like Styrofoam, the unbiodegradeable trash created by a careless post-industrial fill-in-the-blank. “Kitsch made me do it,” she seems to say.

Her backstory, on the other hand, comes straight out of Hawthorne. Her comically ultra-religious family could only have been invented by a fraudulent author intent on milking the sympathies of unthinking teenage cynics. Sarah’s father alternately spanks his offspring or gives them candy; when Jeremiah comes to visit, he’s forbidden to lean on things, including people. He is asked to stand up straight. Grant Wood is the continuity man.

Sarah arrives to rescue him, her chariot a deluxe 18-wheeler, from the street corner where he’s been made to preach. He instantly finds himself back in a world of gas stations and smack: the reader is asked to swallow this bar-bell-size polarity, all in the name of “the irony of American life.”

It would be easy to pin all this on Ms. Argento, daughter of Italian horror auteur Dario Argento, but Ms. Argento’s interpretation is faithful to Leroy’s book. Leroy’s language is touted as “raw”: “I can smell the eucalyptus scent of the living room,” he says of his foster home. But however amusing it is to discover the thin writerliness on the surface of Leroy’s work, the real complaint lies in its hollow premise. Ms. Argento’s film lays those fundamental cliches bare.

The pathos of young Jeremiah’s plight – he is palpably helpless at the beginning of the movie – is squandered by a dream sequence featuring “red-winged crows,” taken literally from Leroy’s book. As a literary device, it is clumsy but forgettable; as a special effect, it is painful. Ms. Argento unwittingly reveals the offhand laziness of Leroy’s seeming craziness.

Only in the end, when Jeremiah has become almost as dark as Sarah, when they are living out of garbage bins, when the story has finally achieved its potential – as a supremely desolate buddy movie – does Ms. Argento’s film begin to come to life. In their stark craziness – marauding through grocery stores, flipping out on traffic medians, stripping randomly, talking in paranoid code – Sarah and Jeremiah approach a kind of levity. They finally seem to understand one another as mother and son, rather than as symbol and symbol. This is where the movie ends, wisely, at Ms. Argento’s decision – Leroy’s book ends in an abusive moment of distrust between Sarah and Jeremiah. Ms. Argento’s artistic license here is welcome; her instincts for creativity pay off, for in these final scenes, she does create, finally, a human tone.

JT Leroy will fade from view. Ms. Argento’s film will do more to hasten his/her obscurity than to slow it. The film version was apparently conceived out of fascination with a depraved American landscape that, being as one-dimensional as its fictional creator, yields little fruit. Leroy’s mythos, like that of James Frey, depends on the idea of redemption, which could have been manifest in a more technically astute film. But the poor production values of this movie suggest wallowing rather than salvation.

blytal@nysun.com