Ethan Hawke directs his daughter in “Wildcat.” But her film is a bust.

Wild cat, the Ethan Hawke-directed biopic starring Maya Hawke and Flannery O'Connor, opens with a trailer for a very different film, a black-and-white drama about “Star Drake,” the pseudonym of a character in O'Connor's short story “The Comforts of Home”. Star Drake has been described as a city flyer who pays for everything with bad checks. The trailer feverishly describes the plot as “the raw story of an indiscreet woman,” a phrase that could actually describe a film about the author herself. But the film that follows is subdued, restrained, even dreamlike, a portrait of an artist who paints her life – controversial, complicated – according to her work.

Maya Hawke plays Flannery at the height of her battle with lupus, the disease that took her father's life when she was a teenager and continues to conquer her at age 39. The film follows the time when her mother Regina (Laura Linney) takes her away from her brief stay in New York among the literary luminaries of the time, back to her native Georgia and the farmhouse of her childhood where Flannery will spend the rest of her life becomes. Hawke and Linney circle each other the way mothers and daughters do in delicate relationships. Regina has read her daughter's stories, but isn't exactly a fan: “I don't understand that,” she says ironically. “Why don’t you want to write something people would do? How read?”

In between these scenes, the film dramatizes some of O'Connor's short stories, including “Revelation,” “The Enduring Chill,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” and “Good Country People.” In a touch of stylistic flair, Hawke and Linney and the rest of the film's main cast appear as the characters within them. They appear almost like visions, with Hawke as Flannery “playing” their analogies – a young student, an aspiring author with a loudly racist mother, an easily charmed girl with a wooden leg, Linney, appears as the mothers, the spinsters and, in One of the better sections of the film, the woman at the center of “Revelation” reacts in horror when she receives a vision of Jesus Christ saying he is capable of resurrecting her as either white trash or a black person before he dies decides for the black person (for whom she uses a different word).

These vignettes and the main narrative arc were shot using the same muted color palette and soft lighting, with a strong influence on the spooky southern landscape that inspired O'Connor's gothic stories. Everything has an appropriate level of cold. Bare trees reach into the sky, which is so blue it has turned green. Grasses are parched and browned while the city architecture sharpens and prods. Hawke, folded on a bench on the train, stuffs a handful of newspaper into the lining of a coat too thin for the weather.

Aura aside, Ethan Hawke and co-screenwriter Shelby Gaines consciously chose not to shy away from O'Connor's more uncomfortable themes and attributes (read: racism), which she portrays with harsh realism in her grotesqueries about small-town politics. of rural ecstatic Catholicism, of ordinary people inflicting everyday cruelties on each other just because they can. But it also doesn't really take into account who O'Connor was and the changing legacy she left behind.

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In Wild cat, the author is shown as someone who viewed the casual, terrible prejudices of the time with a skeptical eye, rather than someone who openly agreed with them. He is unable to reconcile these two opposing ideas at once, and because he likes his main character, the film is, beyond a certain point, unwilling to be as critical as the criticism of her and her work in recent times years has increased.

Wild cat is at times just as creative and effective and darkly funny as its subject, but unlike O'Connor, it's also a little too nice. It's for the fans, not the critics, and in doing so shows the frustrating reluctance to go a little further, to go a little deeper. The Hawkes clearly respect O'Connor and her work, and perhaps it is this affection that clouds their ability to treat her in the same way she has treated her characters, opening them up from the inside out to both her to show her heart as well as her beating heart.

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