Review by steiner-sam

It's a partial biopic of Flannery O'Connor (Maya Hawke), the American novelist and short-story writer between 1948 and about 1953. It's set in New York City, Iowa City, Iowa, and Milledgeville, Georgia. It portrays O'Connor as an obsessive, eccentric writer who is socially inept and profoundly affected by her Roman Catholic faith. Her stories reflect her personality with characters near the psychological edges or with marked handicaps.

"Wildcat" presents biographical scenes with her mother, Regina (Laura Linney) and aunt (Christine Dye), her writing mentor, Robert Lowell (Philip Ettinger), and her priest (Liam Neeson). Frequently interspersed are short fantastical scenes from her short stories in which Flannery and her mother have significant roles embedded in the story's characters. We meet many quirky characters in these scenes. The film ends as Flannery leans into her hereditary illness and embraces her writing.

"Wildcat" includes no great action scenes but does a marvelous job of uncovering O'Connor's struggle to reconcile her writing with her life in rural Georgia, living with people who don't understand her art. Her struggle with her Christian faith is also well portrayed. Ethan Hawke's cinematic balance between O'Connor's life and her story characters is remarkable.