One of the most popular gay authors of modern times, Armistead Maupin, is coming to the movies. His quirky, unsettling and best-selling 2000 novel “The Night Listener,” has been made into a film and will arrive in theaters on Aug. 4 courtesy of Miramax films.

Directed by Patrick Stettner, who partially wrote the screenplay along with Maupin and the author’s former partner Terry Anderson, the movie stars Robin Williams and Toni Collette in a Hitchcock-like rendition of the novel.

“I’ve always wanted to do a genre film,” says Stettner, who is straight. “[‘The Night Listener’] felt very organic and very suspenseful.”

From the film’s opening frames which is like looking through a kaleidoscope of faces and bodies melting into beautiful monstrosities, viewers will realize that the distortion of widely held truths can take on dangerously new interpretations. In the film and book of “The Night Listener,” the power of storytelling and self-mythologizing become inspirations for lingering uncertainties and mental disintegrations.

In the movie, the hero is Gabriel Noone (Williams), a gay writer who shares his fiction installments on his midnight public radio program “Noone at Night.” We learn at the film’s start that his relationship with the lovely Jess (Bobby Cannavale, who also played Will’s boyfriend on “Will & Grace”) is going into that “we need to be apart for a while” phase which usually spells doom for a couple’s future.

Gabriel gets an advanced version of a book from his publisher who asks him to write an endorsement for the cover. In a lonely house and with a broken heart, Gabriel reads the story of a young boy, Pete (Rory Culkin, Macaulay’s younger brother), who is sexually abused by his parents and a host of their reprehensible friends. Pete was infected with HIV during the chronic abuse, and he’s now living with AIDS.

Moved by the boy’s horrific story and the top-notch quality of the writing, Gabriel gets Pete’s number, and the two strike up a relationship by phone. Pete is especially touched by this relationship, because he listened to Gabriel’s show nightly as a child, a pole star of sanity during his twisted upbringing.

Gabriel comes to think of himself as a father to young Pete, and Pete returns the affection. His now-adoptive mother Donna (Collette) is thrilled with their budding relationship, and everything seems sweet and lovely.

That is until Jess throws back the curtain, casting doubt and eventual destruction on this 21st century Ozzie and Harriet. On one of his visits to the house, Jess talks to both Pete and Donna on the phone, and he comes up with a horrifying recognition: they’re the same person.

This gnawing seed of doubt eats away at Gabriel, especially when he discovers no one has ever met or seen Pete. Gabriel tries to visit the boy and Donna at their Wisconsin home, but Donna says Pete is always too sick to see visitors.

Woven through the dark hallways of the story is Gabriel’s desire to believe in this child. His need for a constant love is stripped from his life as Jess retreats more and more, and as Pete becomes the creation of a deranged mind, Gabriel recognizes his own delusional ability to believe in whatever makes his life more bearable.

THE BOOK IS less dark than the film, but the manner in which the novel unravels is more ambiguous.

“Somehow the storylines are able to amble in [the book],” Stettner says. “In a film, once you get up to that level of tension, you can’t not deliver.” This is only Stettner’s third film as a director, following up the 2001 Stockard Channing drama “The Business of Strangers.”

Maupin himself understands the limits of the cinematic genre, having worked on screen versions of his wildly popular “Tales of the City” book installments. The first miniseries, “Tales of the City,” was created for PBS in 1993 and was quickly followed by “More Tales of the City” and “Further Tales of the City” in 1998 and 2001 for cable’s Showtime.

“I’ve been spoiled up until now,” says Maupin of the extended format afforded in a miniseries. “You’ve got an hour and a half to create a movie. Some strains of the story are going to have to go.”

The book progresses at a steady clip, commanding the reader’s attention with an imaginative vice-grip and compelling curiosity. However, adapting the pages devoted to the crumbling relationship between Jess and Gabriel might have proved tedious to a movie audience, and pivotal scenes between Gabriel and his father make only a fleeting appearance in the film.

At the book’s end, everything is in doubt — the entire Pete story, the breakup of Jess and Gabriel and the death of Gabriel’s father. Nothing is as it appears to be. 

“The ending of the book ... was very pleasing to about half of the readers and infuriating to the other half — some of whom, I’m sorry to say, were critics,” Maupin laughs.

The author also points out that when finishing the novel he really didn’t know the story’s true ending, given the mysterious circumstances from which the novel arose.

ANTHONY GODBY JOHNSON was the inspiration for “The Night Listener.” Johnson’s supposed memoir, “A Rock and a Hard Place,” was published in 1993. It was a story of horrendous physical and sexual abuse, and Johnson himself, 15 at the time of publishing, was ravaged by AIDS. The alleged abuse, which is said to have resulted in syphilis, 54 broken bones and a stroke, contributed to his degraded physical state. The book claims the author no longer had a left leg, and his spleen and one testicle were gone.

Add to all this the loss of sight in one eye and a charming personality, and you had an irresistible character who formed strong phone relationships with both Maupin and gay writer Paul Monette, who wrote the introduction for Johnson’s book.

Terry Anderson, who at the time was Maupin’s partner, was, like Jess in “The Night Listener,” the one to reveal that Johnson and his adoptive mother, Vicki Fraginals, were the same person. After a phone call, he recognized the vocal similarity.

Many think that Fraginals invented the character of Johnson and that the tale of abuse is entirely fictionalized, but his book remains on reading lists for survivors of abuse.

A similar situation occurred recently when it was divulged that JT LeRoy, the queer author behind the memoir “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” was a creation of writer Laura Albert, who claimed to be LeRoy’s adoptive mother.

Maupin, however, said that the more concrete ending of the movie was the result of a greater understanding of the episode in his life involving Johnson and Fraginals.

“In 2000, there was still a remote chance in my head that there might be a kid out there,” Maupin says. “By the time the movie came around ... I wanted to deliver a message to the person who perpetrated the whole thing. I understood far more than she thought I did, and I could be compassionate about it.”

IN BOTH VERSIONS of “The Night Listener,” Gabriel uses fiction as an attempt to escape from reality or sometimes to make reality more clear. Donna becomes his shadow image, creating a fiction that wreaks havoc with people’s lives.

“I’m a fabulist by trade,” writes Maupin in the voice of Gabriel in the book. “I’ve spent years looting my life for fiction. Like a magpie, I save the shiny stuff and discard the rest; it’s of no use to me if it doesn’t serve the geometry of the story.”

Maupin acknowledges a similar trend in his own life.

“In the very beginning, I worked out the problems of my life through my writing,” Maupin says. He came out to his parents through his writing, and “The Night Listener” was born out of a need to make sense of the Johnson scenario.

“It was a very odd thing knowing there would be one person out there who would understand this book better than anyone else,” Maupin says, referring to Fraginals.

All of these questions about the nature of fiction call into question the book-reading and movie-going culture’s flimsy delineations between truth and make-believe.

As is the case with LeRoy and embattled memoirist and fraud James Frey, some people argue that the actual veracity of these stories is meaningless — the power of the stories themselves count the most. Stettner pitches his tent in this camp.

“I assume a natural embellishment,” says Stettner. “I tell a story about dinner last night — I’m going to embellish. I am James Frey. I am JT LeRoy. That’s what this whole film is about.”

By the story’s end, Gabriel returns to his NPR studio and begins retelling the story of Gabriel and Pete, most likely spinning it in ways different than the supposed truth.

“Part of this whole thing about him embracing the story at the end is him understanding the effect of the story,” says Stettner. “It is the essence of reaching out to people — gathering around the camp fire and telling our stories.”