When I learned that Ethan Hawke—the actor whose role in Reality Bites made him the epitome of Gen-X cool and therefore an eternal object of my envy—was co-writing and directing a movie about Flannery O’Connor, I was skeptical. What made this dilettantish actor/director/screenwriter/novelist/ex-husband of a Hollywood beauty qualified to treat the life and works of one of America’s greatest writers, a Catholic homebody who wrote about the workings of divine grace with peerless strangeness, beauty, and tragedy? Who was he to cast his daughter, Maya Hawke (Stranger Things), in the starring role? (That is, who was he apart from the writer and director?) I expected disappointment on par with what I felt when Tom Cruise produced a film about my track idol, Steve Prefontaine, or when Ben Affleck starred as Daredevil, my favorite comic-book hero growing up.
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