'Wildcat' is a strangely tame biopic about Flannery O'Connor

Ethan Hawke casts his daughter Maya Hawke in his film about the Southern Gothic writer.

Some might have raised an eyebrow at Ethan Hawke casting his daughter in the lead role of his latest movie.

But Maya Hawke (“Stranger Things”) is far and away the best thing about “Wildcat,” a biopic about famed and tormented Southern writer Flannery O’Connor. Maya Hawke is utterly convincing both physically and emotionally as O’Connor, conveying her combustible mix of piety and rebelliousness, literary genius and chronic pain, in every frame.

The issue is the movie that Ethan Hawke, who serves as director and co-writer with Shelby Gaines, has built around his daughter’s performance. The film intends to illustrate O’Connor’s singular qualities as a writer by dramatizing several of her short stories on screen. But instead of pulling the viewer deeper into O’Connor’s mind, these overwrought scenes push us further away.

O’Connor burned bright and quick, dying in 1964 at the age of 39 of lupus, a disease that kept her in physical agony for most of her short adult life. She left behind two indelible collections of Southern Gothic short stories full of shocking and tender images in which she grappled with her Roman Catholic faith and her Southern heritage. As the film’s epigraph tells us, O’Connor didn’t see fiction as an escape from reality. “It is a plunge into reality.”

“Wildcat” chooses to focus on the early part of her career, when she was just starting as a writer and seemingly out of place everywhere. She leaves her fellow students at the famed University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop in stunned silence after reading one story, and in New York an arrogant publisher (Alessandro Nivola) dismisses her work.

But nowhere is she more out of place than when she comes back home to Georgia, where, as she puts it, “the height of bohemianism is wearing socks out of the house.” Her overbearing, worried mother (Laura Linney) chides Flannery for her social abrasiveness and strange stories, musing passive-aggressively, “I don’t understand why you don’t write something that people would like to read.”

(Photos courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories)

“Wildcat” purports to show how the biographical details of O’Connor’s life inspired her stories, but does so in the most obvious and reductive ways possible. In the dramatized stories, Hawke, Linney and the other actors play the characters, often as outsized and grotesque versions of their real-life counterparts. (Linney, an actress of marvelous subtlety, is really put through the wringer, saddled with overcooked accents and bad prosthetic teeth.)

A little flash of these scenes might have worked, such as the view through the bullet-ridden windshield taken from the unforgettable story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” that opens the movie. But the other dramatizations play like earnest student short films, and it’s far more effective to hear Maya Hawke read O’Connor’s words than to see them dramatized on screen.

I was also a little surprised that “Wildcat” presents O’Connor as more racially progressive than she was, sneering at the casual prejudice of her mother and her friends. In her personal writings, O’Connor revealed that she was not immune to the bigoted environment she grew up in. That a film of her life would choose to whitewash a writer who delved into her own contradictions is disappointing.

The performances are good, the film is full of elegant visual compositions, and the screenplay wisely mines O’Connor’s own work for its best lines. But Ethan Hawke, having made a brilliant biopic about another complicated artist (“Blaze”), this time seems to flinch at an honest and penetrating portrayal of a great writer. Whatever else she was, Flannery O’Connor never flinched.

“Wildcat” is now playing in theaters. In Madison, it opens Friday, May 17 at AMC Fitchburg 18.