As you might guess, Ethan Hawke’s new passion project, Wildcat, is an ambitious paean to creative will, and a won’t-let-go love song to the old-fashioned act of making art. It’s Hawke’s brand by now, and I think we should appreciate what he’s become more than we do: a ubiquitous New York analog-culture gadfly and action-talker testifying at every opportunity to the relevance of handmade artisanship, if not in all the films he acts in (he’s not averse to paychecks), then in the films he’s written and directed, in the commitment to the indie auteurs he couples with (Linklater, Schrader, Almereyda, Ferrara, buddies like Frank Whaley and Vincent D’Onofrio), in the documentaries he’s appeared in, the interviews he garrulously dives into, the magazine stories he publishes, and the manic and deeply read filmhead opinions he spews at the drop of a hat. Name another name actor today as fumingly enamored of the collaborative creative process, and of the long legs of cinema history.
In Wildcat, the object of Hawke’s empathic adulation is none other than Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), ever-revered queen of cold-blooded Southern Gothic fiction and one of the American grain’s preeminent and most merciless portraitists. Movies about writers are tough to make, and often the impulse should be resisted, but I think Hawke has done O’Connor proud, and his ardor for her thorny achievement, under her life’s withering circumstances, is the brew percolating out of this film’s ramshackle pot.
Of course, our foreknowledge and fore-awe of O’Connor’s fiction helps justify what is, ultimately, an homage. The more you heart her work, the more resonant Hawke’s often larky venture feels, while ignorance of the Flanneriad might prove fatal. O’Connor’s real-life story arc is simple and sad: After escaping from the provincial idiocy of her childhood Georgia and entering the mid-century American literati at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Yaddo, and in New York,…
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