Review: Molly Shannon plays a lesbian Emily Dickinson for laughs in ‘Wild Nights With Emily’

With the new Emily Dickinson biopic “Wild Nights With Emily,” the writer-director Madeleine Olnek (“The Foxy Merkins”) argues a very particular point. Buttressed by a trove of letters left behind by the Belle of Amherst to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, the film suggests that the famously death-obsessed poet was involved in a passionate lesbian relationship with her brother’s wife.

Great fodder for sketch comedy, right?

The comedian Molly Shannon, best known for playing the misfit Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher on “Saturday Night Live,” stars as Emily. When we first meet her, she shares a passionate kiss with Susan (Susan Ziegler). The scene is played more for laughs than erotic tension.

Such physical comedy is at odds with other scenes in which the character is taken much more seriously: as a gay writer whose goal of publication was frustrated by men. Writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Brett Gelman) – Emily’s literary mentor, who published her poetry only after her death – is shown performing heavy “surgery,” as she calls it, to make her verse’s often eccentric punctuation conform to convention.

Assisting with Higginson’s overeager editing is Mabel Loomis Todd (Amy Seimetz), portrayed as a condescending patron whose lectures and writing helped establish the myth of Dickinson as a troubled recluse.

There are issues of serious literary scholarship and biography here that might benefit from a more straight-faced approach, but Olnek opts to make them go down easy, with a light storytelling tone and a style of cinematography that avoids the soft-focus approach of similar period pieces. For the most part, “Wild Nights” looks and feels like a TV sitcom.

Sometimes, this works. Todd once wrote about playing piano music that inspired Dickinson to compose verse on the spot. Although there’s no record of what songs she played, Olnek uses the episode to speculate – with amusing results – as to why so much of Dickinson’s poetry can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

But if such jokes often work, the drama more frequently doesn’t. One scene, in which Emily recites “I died for Beauty – but was scarce” – a poem in which the writer imagines her own death – turns into a heavy-handed dialogue between the poet and a slave.

“Wild Nights” largely sidesteps the worst tropes of biographical drama, but when it falls, it falls hard. At one point, Susan compares her lover’s work to that of Helen Hunt Jackson, a popular contemporary of Dickinson’s who is mostly forgotten today: “Who will we read in 100 years?” Susan asks, knowingly.

The cheeky energy of “Wild Nights” is a welcome corrective to the reverence of Terence Davies’s 2016 “A Quiet Passion,” which starred Cynthia Nixon as Dickinson. But “Wild Nights” goes too far at times, threatening to reduce the writer’s life to the punchline of a literary version of Rodney Dangerfield: She got no respect.