Wildcat

This expressionistic blending of a biography about a great author and an adaptation of the subject's short stories is an interesting misfire from director Ethan Hawke and his co-writer and frequent musical collaborator Shelby Gaines. The filmmaker's daughter, Maya Hawke, disappears into the role of the truculent Southern Gothic novelist, short story writer, and essayist Flannery O'Connor, as well as several characters inspired by O'Connor's writings. Laura Linney, who plays O'Connor's mother, Regina, joins Hawke in playing multiple fictional characters as well.

As with Ethan Hawke's more traditional (and more successful) qazi-biopic Blaze, Wildcat is a small, thoughtful movie. Episodic in structure, the film uses its biographical elements almost like a frame story on which to hang episodes that follow themes, situations, and characters from various short stories and nonfiction writing by O'Connor. These narrative fragments are presented almost like fantasies or creative imaginations the young author has at various points after she finds herself stuck in her mother's house suffering from lupus, the autoimmune disease that killed her father. Wildcast is admirable in its intentions and ambition as a project, but it doesn't fully come together as a film.