Wildcat

It started with an audition. Maya Hawke, Robin in 'Stranger Things', came across Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal as a teenager and turned some of its entries into the monologue she used to try out for Juilliard. Years later she asked her father, Ethan Hawke, to help her bring the writer to the screen. The result is 'Wildcat', an unconventional biopic about one of the great voices of Southern Gothic fiction.

It's the early 1950s. Flannery is a young writer from Georgia, a devout Catholic set on making her name, and she heads to New York to get a publisher to take her first novel, 'Wise Blood'. What she won't do is tell him in advance where the book is going. Back home, the news is bad. She's diagnosed with lupus, the disease that killed her father, and has to move in with her mother, Regina (Laura Linney), in Milledgeville.

Living together isn't easy. Regina doesn't always understand what her daughter writes, and Flannery is troubled by her mother's racial prejudice. As the illness takes hold and her faith is tested, the film opens out into O'Connor's own stories, whose characters turn up on screen wearing Maya Hawke's and Linney's faces, in what the director calls a meditation on imagination, faith and reality.

Philip Ettinger plays the poet Robert Lowell, Willa Fitzgerald is Elizabeth Hardwick and Liam Neeson appears as a priest, with Steve Zahn, Cooper Hoffman, Rafael Casal, Alessandro Nivola and Vincent D'Onofrio also in the cast. Hawke, who'd already told the story of musician Blaze Foley in 'Blaze', wrote the script with Shelby Gaines from the author's journal, letters and stories, and shot it in Louisville, Kentucky, in January and February 2023.

It had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on 1 September 2023 and played Toronto a few days later. Oscilloscope gave it a limited US release on 3 May 2024. Reviews were mixed: some admired the attempt, others wanted a deeper portrait of the writer herself, but plenty of critics singled out Maya Hawke's performance.

• Biography
• Drama
• Fantasy