Flannery O’Connor was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, a troubled soul whose intense Catholicism collided with the grotesqueries she witnessed in the mid-century American South. Maya Hawke plays O’Connor in Ethan Hawke’s unconventional bio-pic.

Using different aspect ratios, shifting between black and white and color, Ethan Hawke takes us not only through O’Connor’s troubled life–one marred by a disease that would eventually take her life at age 39–but also through the vicissitudes of the writing process. Maya Hawke captures O’Connor’s mercurial personality, and the result is a blazing biopic that seems to have sprung from the mind of the writer who serves as its subject.

“A dreamy movie that evokes O’Connor’s biggest project: an inquiry into the broken nature of grace.” –Alissa Wilkinson, Vox