It really seemed that Errol Morris had decided to devote his considerable talents as a documentary filmmaker to heavier, more deeply important fare, never again to revisit the sort of offbeat stories and individuals that he originally made his name with in nineteen-seventies films such as Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida. Maybe after immersing himself if the self-defeating circular logic of Robert McNamara in discussing the debacle of the Vietnam war and, perhaps even more disheartening, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Morris knew he needed something lighter, weirder, flintier. He couldn’t have found a better subject for a change of pace than the sordid adventures of Joyce McKinney, a U.S. beauty queen who got herself entangled in a amazing array of scandals in the nineteen-seventies that were covered with frothing exuberance by the British tabloids. Tabloid is Morris’s gobsmacked effort to condense the strident lunacy of McKinney’s story into something easily consumable and frightfully entertaining, especially as the twists and turns pile up like the product of a skilled pulp novelist in the middle of an eight-day absinthe bender. In the past, Morris could sometimes seem condescending to his oddball subjects, but the mockery is kept at a minimum, as if his time covering more somber stories has introduced a welcome instinctual restraint. Besides, McKinney needs no finessing to get turned into a sideshow; she does that all on her own as she spills her unlikely tale straight into the camera with the overanxious enthusiasm of someone who was happiest when she was being blinded by a constellation of camera flashbulbs exploding before her eyes.