Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat opens, very almost, with a well-known situation: a dispiriting encounter between a younger artist with an exacting artistic imaginative and prescient and a standard company gatekeeper with a guidelines method to what sells. The scene depicts a real-life change between 24-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor (performed by Maya Hawke, the director’s daughter) and her editor at Holt Rinehart concerning her unfinished novel Sensible Blood, which the editor needs to adapt to typical literary norms. “Generally I really feel such as you’re attempting to stay pins in your readers,” he remarks and proceeds to make the identical level twice extra in several phrases.

Like the same framing machine in Greta Gerwig’s Little Ladies, which has Jo March attempting to promote a narrative to a hardnosed newspaper editor, this scene in Wildcat might be seen as a filmmaker’s assertion. “I’m amenable to criticism,” Flannery says, after which qualifies, “however solely inside the sphere of what I’m attempting to do.” She provides: “I really feel that no matter virtues the novel could have are very a lot related to the restrictions you point out.… I’m not writing a standard novel. Sensible Blood, when completed, can be hopefully … simply as odd, if not odder than the 9 chapters you’ve now.”

If Hawke got down to make an odd movie about an odd author — even perhaps poking unsuspecting viewers anticipating a standard biopic — considered one of Wildcat’s oddest strikes comes on the very starting, earlier than the film correct. The very first thing we see is a mock Fifties-style trailer for Star Drake, an imaginary adaptation of O’Connor’s brief story “The Comforts of House.” Plot components are recognizable from the supply matter (a usually hair-raising story of parent-child battle, on this case between an grownup son and his aged mom over a troubled younger girl, recognized as a nymphomaniac, on whom the mom takes pity). However the tone of the trailer suggests a lurid melodrama with little if any of the cultural environment or non secular resonance of O’Connor’s darkly comedian, nondidactic, but deeply Catholic work. An onscreen title then publicizes, “Our Function Presentation.”

Wildcat payments itself as “based mostly on brief tales by Flannery O’Connor,” although it may equally be stated to be based mostly on O’Connor’s letters (the supply for a lot of Flannery’s dialogue) and her prayer journal (used to depict her prayer life in earnest voiceovers).

Is that this over-the-top trailer a satiric indictment of prior O’Connor diversifications (for instance, The Life You Save, the 1957 small-screen adaptation of “The Life You Save Could Be Your Personal,” which starred Gene Kelly and was ruined by a tacked-on blissful ending)? Is Hawke skewering his Hollywood milieu as O’Connor skewered the pieties and foibles of the agricultural South? If that’s the case, this may occasionally even be an indirect acknowledgment of the problem of doing justice in a display adaptation to so idiosyncratic a author; it could even, maybe, be a confession of Wildcat’s probably “limitations.”