Read all about it: "Tabloid"

The pleasure of watching Errol Morris's documentary Tabloid lies in seeing an extraordinary tall tale unfolded in front of you, and it almost seems a shame to spoil any element of it by attempting anything so banal as a synopsis: it would suffice to say this is a story worth hearing at least once, pack you off to the cinema, and leave any review at that. For those who do need more, however, this is the story of Joyce McKinney, a honey-dewed Southern beauty of the Cybill Shepherd variety, who in the late 1970s fell in love with one Kurt Anderson, a plump and somewhat ungainly Canadian. Like most great love stories, this one didn't go entirely smoothly. She was a good Christian girl; he a devout Mormon whose elders frowned upon the couple's union. On the eve of their wedding, he left her standing, removed by his church from this apparent temptation, and what happened thereafter is, let's say, open to interpretation.

Some established facts are these: ever-dogged, McKinney assembled a motley crew of assistants, tracked Anderson down to the UK, and allegedly kidnapped him, then drove him to a cottage in Devon, where she apparently shackled her man to the bed and - if you will - rode him like Seabiscuit. "She wanted to be inseminated?," an understandably incredulous Morris asks Peter Tory, the Daily Express columnist who first broke the story. "That's the polite word for it," is Tory's response. What becomes evident is that there was only one force in Kurt Anderson's life more oppressive than the Mormons, and that was Joyce McKinney, a force of nature, whose own interpretation of these events - when interviewed by Morris - is a good deal more florid. According to her, the couple's time together in that "honeymoon romantic cottage" involved "three days of fun, food and sex" that led to "a melting of two souls". Well, you decide.

All I'll say is note is that Joyce, like any number of Southern belles, certainly isn't backwards in coming forwards, and - as you'd probably expected from someone who filmed themselves at a young age reading from their own autobiography - isn't exactly shy about putting herself out there. When the tabloids dug a little deeper into this bombshell's past, they uncovered daytime sex work and a vast portfolio of nudie pics, both with a bondage theme - and, as the Max Mosley brouhaha demonstrated - there is no story we Brits are fascinated by more than one involving whips, shackles and chains. As several interviewees note, the McKinney story had all the ingredients (religion, a nubile blonde, kinky sex) to sustain a tabloid feeding frenzy or circulation war - that sadly retired phrase - and the story that develops is exactly what happens when a bunch of muckrakers set out on the tail of individuals who not only have muck to be raked, but would appear all too happy to splash about in it if it meant it landed them on the front pages. (In the wake of her trial and acquittal, Joyce became a regular on the West End celebrity circuit.)

We're invited to weigh up how much Joyce was hounded and how much she encouraged this attention, how stable she might have been and how stable she is today, and Morris nudges it all along with his usual razorsharp editing, teasing score and evocative use of archive material. I suspect there will be some who wonder how the final third - involving the cloning of canines in Korea (!) - connects up to anything, but it's entirely of a piece with the offbeam nature of the McKinney worldview, and with the genus of shaggy-dog story commonly heard in Morris's terrific TV series First Person, of which Tabloid - more so than the director's previous The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure - seems a direct descendant. "There was something in that story for everyone," Tory ventures at one point. "It was the perfect tabloid story." The film that story has inspired is not profound, particularly - and certainly not as disquieting an analysis of our tabloid culture as it might have been - but it is hugely entertaining, and confirms Morris as one of the foremost American storytellers of our time.

Tabloid opens in selected cinemas from Friday.