I've sat on this review for an awfully long time. Don't let anyone tell you that procrastination never pays off.

I saw The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things a year ago, at the 2005 SXSW Film Festival; by that point, it had already been on the festival circuit for almost a year. It was picked up by Palm Pictures for North American distribution at Cannes in 2005, exactly one year after its world premiere. At some point, it was possibly worth asking why writer/director/shameless showboat Asia Argento had so much trouble getting her splashily filmed, star-studded translation of name-brand memoirist J.T. Leroy's short stories into theaters. At this point, now that Leroy has been unmasked as the brainchild of three middle-aged wannabes, it's easy to close the case with a two-part answer: 1) the film is terrible, and 2) it is, in fact, so bad, that without a New York Times-endorsed scandal for Palm to latch its marketing campaign on to, its release would be damn near impossible. Oddly, now that it's able to hide behind the mask of Leroy's unmasking, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things gets to wear a certain kind of cachet; a literary scandal has a funny way of making what's actually been burned onto the celluloid seem a little less unconscionable.

So let's talk about that scandal. It's much more interesting than anything in Argento's film.
Palm Pictures, clearly knowing a good/bad setup when it lands on their doorstep and demands a punchline, has (savvily? smarmily?) incorporated the Leroy scandal into their marketing campaign for Deceitful (haha) to an unprecedented degree.  A great moment in media occurred last month when the Gawkers, their communal fingers ever poised above the EasySnark button, published a cellphone-snap of the movie's poster, pointed out the quote marks around Leroy's name, and attributed the punctuation to "crazy, aspiring copy-editors — always toting your Sharpies, ready for the attack." They later updated the post with the revelation that the quotes were not graffiti but, in fact "the ironic work of Palm Pictures, featured on all of the posters".

Whether Palm's campaign of transparency will transcend joke status has yet to be determined (Box Office Mojo pegs the film's opening weekend returns at $10,000 over 2 screens – not a runaway hit, but not exactly a dismal failure), but in some kind of stroke of genius, they've made it very easy for us to ignore the film in favor of the associated backstory. Behold, the ""JT Leroy" Timeline" – a handy guide to the myth, as it was constructed in real time, in plain air, aided and abetted by the media. Amazingly, it includes items that never happened ("1980: Jeremiah Leroy is born on Halloween in West Virginia"); and things that sort of happened) "1994: JT attempts to contact established writers ... by faxing them from a fax machine that he carries around with him.") right up against high points from the unmasking ("Oct 17, 2005: New York Magazine article by Stephen Beachy questions JT's existence"). It all leads up to the inevitable, laughable conclusion: "Mar 10, 2006: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is released in theaters."

So, the scandal, in brief: In the mid-90s, some one calling themselves JT Leroy appeared out of the ether. Introducing him/her/itself as a former truck stop prostitute, and HIV-stricken homeless drug addict, Leroy befriended a host of celebrities, literary (Dennis Cooper was some kind of mentor) and otherwise, and used them to help get his stories – based on his sick, sad, fake childhood – published. In 1996, some incarnation of Leroy is said to have met Winona Ryder; he "accompanies her to the opera and the two become close friends".  After four years of regularly publishing work in venues such as Nerve and SPIN, and expanding his circle of enamored celebrities to include Courtney Love, Carrie Fisher and Tatum O'Neal, Leroy published his first novel, Sarah. The advance for that novel was paid to one JoAnna Albert – the sister of Laura Albert, the 40-year-old woman eventually outed as the true author of Leroy's work.

Around the time "his" (love those quotes) first novel came out, Albert and her longtime partner, Geoffrey Knoop, realized they needed a public face for their creation. Enter Savannah, Knoop's half sister. The 20-something anatomic female began to appear in public as JT (the jury's still out on who took Winona to the opera) in 2001, wearing a blonde wig, sunglasses, and a black hat, the overall effect being something like Michael Jackson's self ideal. With the younger Knoop at the ready, Albert began injecting Leroy into pop culture, full scale. "Leroy" published two more books, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and Harold's End; he wrote the first draft of Gus Van Sant's Palme D'or-winner Elefant, and was credited as a producer on the film; and, in my favorite twist of all, in the body of Knoop, he began to conquer celebrity fashion culture, culminating in a 2001 photoshoot for Vanity Fair, which "JT" conducted "in drag" – that is, Savannah Knoop got her little picture taken. When questions about Leroy's "mysterious" identity were raised, Knoop, Albert/whoever tossed out the Defensive Tranny card: "As a transgendered human, subject to attacks," read a statement provided to the New York Times just before the final reveal, "I use stand-ins to protect my identity." A month after Warren St. John published that gem, Geoffrey Knoop went on record on the hoax. "The jig is up", he told St. John, admitting that Laura wrote the stories, Savannah wore the wig, and he, presumably, sat back and counted the cash.

There's an essay here, somewhere, about the powerful lure of the Leroy myth on the celebrities "he" befriended. It's worth noting that Carrie Fisher and Courtney Love, though undoubtedly fun to dish about in their own ways, are not exactly A-listers; one imagines that a young upstart would need more than a sob story and a hair piece to weasel his/her way into the life of, say, Brad Pitt. My favorite wrinkle in all of this, though, is Asia Argento's response to Leroy's unmasking. Coming almost two years after her ugly little film first premiered, she's understandably caught off guard. But check this out – according to Gawker, after the NY premiere of the film, Argento told the unfortunate assembled mass: “I mean, I slept with J.T. I touched his pussy. I just thought they make great pussies these days. I don’t know. I couldn’t see, it was dark. He said he was on hormones, that was why the boobs were there. I just thought they make great pussies nowadays.”

She's obviously having fun up there – prancing around in hooker wear, tarting up young Cole Sprouse like pre-pubescent bad girl, and, just for the hell of it, casting Marilyn Manson and Lydia Lunch and Hasil Adkins in bit parts. None of that is too troubling, I suppose, but Argento's breezy satisfaction with her work doesn't sit well with its unrelentingly execrable content. Believe her about her encounter with Leroy, or don't, but know that if Argento made this film under the impression that Leroy's stories were true, she gets a kind of get-out-of-jail free card when it comes to the horror she's put on screen. Asia has spent much of her time in the press denying that her father, Dario Argento, the Salvador Dali of 70s horror, has had much of an impact on her own career as an auteur, and it's true that, stylistically, she's learned nothing from her dad the master. But certainly, there's a common urge between daughter and daddy to give the viewer not only something that they've never seen before, but something so outlandishly horrific, they could have never even contemplated it. At least Dario has a genre skeleton to build upon; for Asia to unleash such horrors within the confines of a coming-of-age tale reveals some kind of lunacy. I mean, balls.