I reread Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories this year. Her fiction is widely known for its grotesqueries, its freaks and misfits and grifters, its paroxysms of violent grace. Yet I was struck this time around by the stories’ domesticities, particularly the pattern of O’Connor’s casting so many of her protagonists as jaded intellectuals stuck at home with their mothers. Many of these characters grew up as precocious children, more intelligent than everyone around them, and moved away to elite centres of culture. Returning to the South, often because they are sick or disabled, they disdain their backwater surroundings and resent that they are dependent on their less sophisticated family members. It is an irony that O’Connor came back to repeatedly because it was the irony of her daily life. O’Connor is almost always skewering a type. I had not appreciated how often that type was her own.

This was months before the May theatrical release of Wildcat, the O’Connor biopic directed by Ethan Hawke and starring his daughter Maya Hawke. But it is just this aspect of O’Connor’s life, the ad hoc, un-ideal domestic arrangement, that the film zeroes in on. If O’Connor’s art shows us how persistently she turned her gaze in on herself, the film gives us the view from the other side—her struggle to reconcile herself to her state, to find the place within herself where art, suffering, and creativity meet.

It was a complex, multi-layered struggle—with her illness, with her place, with her mother, with herself, with God. Wildcat brings us into O’Connor’s story at the moment all these struggles are brought to bear on a single point in her life: the months surrounding her diagnosis with lupus, the disease that killed her father when she was a child and would eventually kill her.

The film opens with O’Connor in New York City tangling with a publishing executive over her novel and afterward debriefing with her friend Robert Lowell (who to his intimates, O’Connor included, was known as Cal). Shortly after the meeting she travels home feeling sick, and before long she has been diagnosed with lupus. This development sets up the central drama of the film: she will never move away again, and she must learn to accept this reality and find within it the means to fulfilling what she sees as her vocation.

Along the way we get extended glimpses in flashback of her time at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, when her talent was emerging and when a promising professional and possibly romantic (though ultimately thwarted) relationship with Cal was developing. But all this is mere backdrop. O’Connor’s inner struggles are where the real action is. Herein lies the film’s most interesting feature: its interleaving of several of O’Connor’s short stories into the narrative of her life. Through these vignettes we get both adaptations in miniature of several classic stories, a treat in its own right, and an interpretation of O’Connor’s life, how she transformed her setting, experiences, and constraints into art and was in the process herself transformed. O’Connor’s prayer journal from her days as a graduate student at the University of Iowa shows that within the acerbic, un-self-pitying public persona was a fragile, insecure, sometimes self-flagellating human being. Excerpts from the journal are overlaid onto the film in voice-over, highlighting the dissonance between these two parts of herself.

Maya Hawke—who, remember, plays O’Connor—also plays the main character in each of the stories represented in the film. But it might be more accurate to say that Maya Hawke plays Flannery O’Connor imagining her characters. The same is true of Laura Linney, who plays both Flannery’s mother, Regina, and the mother in each of the stories. But again, to be true to the film’s conceit, it is Flannery imagining her mother in the role of mother, working out the frustrations and solaces of living as a disabled adult with one’s parent. The presence of the stories in the film, then, is not simply an homage to O’Connor but a representation of O’Connor’s creativity at work. When O’Connor stops writing and goes back to revise, the vignettes go back too. And when O’Connor sees a one-armed man in the train station, Mr. Shiftlet, the one-armed drifter from “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” comes to life.

It’s easy to get so wrapped up in an author’s biographical details that the work of art itself is obscured. But O’Connor is one of those rare authors whose life and art mutually inform each other to the extent that they seem inseparable. The film’s placing of O’Connor and her mother at the heart of her stories does not reduce her art to biography but broadens it by placing us within the landscape of O’Connor’s imagination: we see her seeing herself as a mentally disabled young woman experiencing the wonder of language, or as a one-legged atheist who’s not nearly as worldly-wise as she would like to think she is. In exploring these possibilities, Wildcat asks not what O’Connor’s work means but what her life means: How does one become the kind of person who could write such odd and powerful stories? What was her habit of being? The film becomes a kind of virtue ethics of the imagination, a searching into and representation of the mechanisms of creative invention.

In one of the most poignant and crucial scenes in the film, O’Connor pulls a pair of crutches out of the closet, surely her father’s. In this moment O’Connor accepts that she will live with the disease and that her life will shape itself around her suffering. Her transformation is not yet complete, however; the consequences of that acceptance are yet to be worked out. There will, for instance, be a late-night bedside visit from an Irish priest played by Liam Neeson. In what threatens to degenerate into boilerplate spiritual direction, O’Connor’s intolerance for religious pabulum tears through the priest’s insouciance and draws out of him true spiritual wisdom and an affirmation of her vocation as a writer. It is a mutual blessing. After this encounter O’Connor’s station in life—her illness, her place, her family, her self-doubt—becomes not the crutch that hobbles her but the crucible out of which her vocation and art emerge. The film closes on a fantastical image. O’Connor, having struggled to rearrange a ground-floor room (she can no longer climb the stairs) into her new monastic-like writing space, sits down at her typewriter when a giant peacock’s train, illuminated from the window opposite, flourishes behind her, the artist emerging transfigured into her full, true self.

It is not difficult to imagine O’Connor arching a wry eyebrow at the image of herself with a peacock’s tail—a symbol, she might quip, more of vainglory than of creative self-possession. Yet O’Connor herself was not beyond rhapsodizing the beauty of a peacock’s tail. In her story “The Displaced Person,” the Catholic priest Father Flynn witnesses a peacock rattling its train: “The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head.” The priest stands “transfixed, his jaw slack,” and exclaims, “Christ will come like that!”

O’Connor raised peafowl on her farm in Georgia. She is matter-of-fact about them in her letters, but they seemed to possess for her a highly condensed symbolic power. They appear in her self-portraits and in her essays as well as in her fiction. The peacock in “The Displaced Person” is described in almost angelic terms, and that is just what it is: a herald of the Lord’s presence in creation. The rattling peacock train in the final shot of Wildcat takes a similar vector: the reconciliation of O’Connor’s uncompromising literary ambition with her deeply spiritual, vulnerable longing to please God. The timbrous noise could almost be the wind of the Holy Spirit descending.

In 1880 Matthew Arnold predicted that “most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” This prediction hasn’t borne out, but that hasn’t stopped much of the literary world from acting as if it had. O’Connor was in this way defiantly out of step with the milieu of her day. In one flashback scene, O’Connor attends a dinner party full of literary strivers, hosted by Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick says that, now that she has outgrown her childhood Catholicism, she thinks of the Eucharist as a useful literary symbol. (It was Mary McCarthy who said this in real life, though Hardwick was in attendance.) O’Connor snaps, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” It’s a classic O’Connor anecdote, and could almost feel obligatory; but the film needn’t have included it. Had the film taken a more predictable line with regard to faith and art, it would have been more accessible to more people. Yet to do so would have been to misunderstand and misrepresent O’Connor and to soften her spikier, more contrarian impulses. Her art was an expression of her faith, but her faith was never reducible to her art. It’s refreshing to watch a film about “the creative process as an act of ‘faith,’” as Ethan Hawke has described it, that doesn’t dissolve the latter into the former. Hawke has also said that “Flannery O’Connor believed that devoting oneself to making art that is egoless and honest can be an act of piety.” By this measure Wildcat could also be said to be an act of piety, though not of hagiography. And for that we can be thankful.