When Sharon Mitchell is asked by an audience member during a public performance whether the film she’s currently working on is “truth or fiction,” she claims not to know for sure because she doesn’t know whether she’s more truth or fiction. Kamikaze Hearts (1986), a Golden Age of Porn-set movie of which Mitchell and her girlfriend, Tina “Tigr” Mennett, are the subjects, is just as finicky with reality as the former claims she is. It disclaims early on that everything we’re seeing is accurate, save for the use of a few pseudonyms requested by those appearing onscreen, when really it’s almost all staged, and what wasn’t explicitly scripted improvised. This ostensible documentary’s vérité textures are, like Mitchell’s baby Norma Desmond-like self-assurance, affectations devised by the movie’s tricksy director, Juliet Bashore, who was film school-fresh when the movie was conceived and who’d originally intended it to more broadly survey the profession on which it homes in.

Her thick dark hair stylishly shorn pixie-short to stand out, Mitchell prolifically and successfully performs in adult movies when not doing sex shows. She got into a relationship with bottle-blonde-mulleted Mennett, who’s newer to an industry for which she’s so far worked more often behind the scenes, after they shot something together not long ago. When she met Mitchell, Mennett had assumed her soon-to-be paramour was “just another dumb porno slut.” She ended up falling in love with her for her unusual-for-women-in-porn sense of power, becoming, in Mennett’s eyes, not that dissimilar from a “deity.” 

Mitchell, or at least this putatively heightened version of her, acts and speaks like a star in a way that makes Mennett’s conception of her as bigger than life immediately legible and infectious. Mitchell claims that her star so consumes her that, in bed, she feels like she’s playing a character. It doesn’t matter if she’s in front of or off camera. She provocatively asserts that one of her biggest idols is Ronald Reagan, not because their respective ideologies align but because the actor turned president has achieved the sort of take-over-the-world fantasy about which most performers can only dream. 

Mitchell’s divadom will wear on the viewer, and on Tigr. The unwavering conviction of someone working in a disrespected industry isn’t the problem. It’s invigorating, as is Bashore’s sober look at people working in a field that, though not without problems like inappropriate bosses and unreasonable conditions, still poses plain and simple work, those populating the sector largely just trying to get by and have a decent time in the process. (A cameraman at one point professes his surprise that, when he started working in adult movies, many of his colleagues turned out to actually be smart operators, hardly bubbleheaded vectors for STDs in the way they might be stereotyped as.) 

Problematic in Mitchell’s case is her ever-swelling, heroin-supplemented ego, which is making it hard for Tigr to discern if what they have together is genuine love or something more defined by other things. Mitchell extols the virtues of having a girlfriend on set because it’s a pretty good safeguard against unwanted advances. Tigr’s drug addiction could be abetting what’s more idolatry than mutual, authentic adoration, not necessarily the “truth serum” it will once be touted as. Not knowing how much of Kamikaze Hearts can be taken at face value is part of what makes it so thrilling. It befits a story of a toxic pair who aren’t totally sure if what they have is what they think they have, and who spend most of their time doing work, as the critic Beatrice Loayza has observed, in a reality-distorting field “in which real sex acts are performed in fake contexts.”