It bears the title “Tabloid,” so the wildly entertaining new film by Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris sounds as though it’s supremely well-timed to benefit from the current scandal erupting around the sleazy practices of Rupert Murdoch’s news organization.

And yes, the film does delve

into the, shall we say, “colorful” arena of British tabloid journalism. Interviews with a couple of tabloid reporters leave no doubt about the fragrant world of the scandal sheet.

But despite its title, “Tabloid” isn’t a broadside on all that. It actually has a bunch of wacky topics to cover, including animal cloning and some of the unusual beliefs of the Mormon church.

But primarily, Morris has been entranced by a woman, one Joyce McKinney, a now-60ish former Miss Wyoming who has quite a tale to tell. A bubbly charmer with an uncanny ability to influence others, McKinney reflects on her past, which includes an episode involving the cloning of her dog, Booger. You’ll have to see the movie to hear about that.

More importantly, McKinney tells the tale of her instant (and apparently permanent) love for a rather schlumpy man named Kirk Anderson back in the mid-1970s. In the midst of a courtship, Anderson suddenly vanished on a Mormon mission to England.

According to McKinney, this was kidnapping by a cult. So she went to England to kidnap him right back, and thereby hangs a lurid tale of a remote cottage, manacles and a sexual initiation that was either forced or consensual.

When the British tabloids got wind of this episode, it became headline news as the story of the “Manacled Mormon” and McKinney had a brief heyday as a scandal queen.

And even that wasn’t the end of it, as Morris’ film gleefully demonstrates. There may be something a little too gleeful about this movie, actually; Morris’ tendency to emphasize the geek-show aspects of his subjects (going back to “Gates of Heaven”) gets loose here. I wonder whether he needed to get a little silly after the heaviness of his previous pictures, “Standard Operating Procedure” and “The Fog of War.”

The movie raises so many topics, you wish Morris would go deeper. There’s a great movie to be made of the tabloid world, but “Tabloid” uses it mostly as a backdrop. And just as Morris begins to dig into Mormon beliefs about the afterlife, he leaves the subject for something else.

But who can blame him? McKinney is such a larger-than-life character, she easily pulls focus toward her creative rationalizations and her genius for coining a phrase.

Whether he’s looking at Abu Ghraib or Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara or dog cemeteries, Morris likes to explore how people will believe things that are clearly contradicted by objective reality. In that sense, maybe the film’s many threads tie together after all.

“Tabloid” ½

A wildly enjoyable documentary by Oscar-winner Errol Morris, focusing on a very colorful lady named Joyce McKinney, who was once involved in a notorious British kidnapping case and later in a dog-cloning tale. The movie’s a bit of a geek show (McKinney is a gloriously wacky gal) and strikes out in a number of different directions, but never fails to entertain.

Rated: Not rated; probably R for subject matter, language, nudity

Showing: Guild 45th