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From Patty Hearst to Casey Anthony, the people who seize our imagination in tabloid news stories have an aura about them, an inimitable tawdry glow.

Joyce McKinney, the crazy-love Southern belle at the heart of Errol Morris’ succulent, fascinating, and bizarrely touching documentary “Tabloid” is one of those people.

In 1977, she was a former beauty-queen contestant who gave up everything to stalk and possess the man of her dreams. He was a Mormon, and what happened blew up into a scandal that kept on giving. There was true Love, religious rage, kidnapping, bondage, a girl-next-door-turned-prostitute, and even dog cloning.

In photographs and home movies from the time, Joyce McKinney has a kitten-with-a-whip innocence — she’s like Veronica Lake in go-go boots — and Morris, interviewing her now, doesn’t have to do much coaxing. She’s perky and articulate and outrageously self-justifying. She offers her version of how, and why, she tailed her lover, Kirk Anderson, to England, abducted him from a Mormon meetinghouse, and took him to a cottage where she bound him to a bed and had sex with him for three days.

The story may sound like an erotically charged version of Stephen King’s “Misery,” but McKinney convinces audiences that she wasn’t just deranged. She was also a true romantic out to save a man she felt, not without some evidence, had been brainwashed.

Morris, interviewing the Fleet Street reporters and photographers who covered the events at the time, wants to deconstruct the addictive, almost metastasizing power of how tabloid news stories work on us. “Tabloid” is short and sweet — it’s pure movie candy — but by the end audiences will forge an emotional connection to Joyce McKinney at the deep core of her fearless, nutty valor.