This flawed but very entertaining two-hander belongs in the unique subgenre of literary biographies in which a cult author’s life is investigated through the highly specific prism of their work. Shirley Jackson, for example, was cast into a dark Gothic psychodrama in Josephine Decker’s Shirley; William S. Burroughs became a drug-addicted spy who reports to a big talking-ass beetle in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch; and similarly, as she waits for inspiration to strike, Patricia Highsmith communes with the spirit of her most famous character — suave psychopath Tom Ripley — in Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder.
The framing
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