Wildcat, the Ethan Hawke-directed, Maya Hawke-starring Flannery O’Connor biopic, begins with a trailer for an entirely different movie, a black-and-white drama about “Star Drake,” the alias of a character from O’Connor’s short story “The Comforts of Home.” Star Drake was dubbed the town floozy who pays for everything with bad checks. The trailer feverishly describes the plot as “the outspoken story of an indiscreet woman,” a phrase that could indeed describe a movie about the author herself. But the film that follows is muted, restrained, even dreamlike, a portrait of an artist that paints her life—controversial, complicated—according to her work.

Maya Hawke plays Flannery at the cusp of her battle with lupus, the disease that took her father’s life when she was a teenager, and that will claim her own at 39. The film follows along as her mother Regina (Laura Linney) transfers her from her short stay in New York amongst the literary luminaries of the time, back home to Georgia and the childhood farmhouse in which........

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