handful of days before she was scheduled to have a lobotomy, the writer Janet Frame, who was a patient at the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum at the time, found out that she had won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. The prize, then one of New Zealand’s premier literary honors, was saluting The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951), her first published collection of work. The accolade led Seacliff to cancel the procedure; six years later, after a smattering of appearances in local publications, Frame would, pretty

officially, begin her literary career with the release of her first novel, Owls Do Cry.

Early in life, the director Jane Campion was struck by Frame, who grew to become among New Zealand’s most acclaimed and prolific but misunderstood writers. Campion read Owls Do Cry for the first time in 1968, when she was 14 years old; while studying film at the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School in the early 1980s, Campion’s mother sent over a copy of one of Frame’s three autobiographies, To the Is-Land (1982). Campion, who would stay up reading the memoir, sobbing through certain passages, has said that she emotionally connected with Frame, especially in regard to their respective childhoods. The attachment grew so strong that, that 1982, Campion found herself intent on helming a miniseries about Frame’s life, in an effort to help bolster the author’s notoriety.

Campion met Frame that year, both to get to know her and ask for the rights to To the Is-Land. The meeting was cordial but did not come with the immediate greenlighting Campion was hoping for. Frame asked the former to wait until the release of her next two memoirs, wanting the filmmaker to have a comprehensive portrait of her life before dramatization. Campion, in turn, would busy herself by directing a series of shorts, a telefilm, and a feature-length.

Eventually, though, the director would see her thirst to cinematize Frame’s story through: In 1990, just a year after making her bona-fide directorial debut with Sweetie, An Angel at My Table premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Reviews were exalting; audiences were so loud in their appreciation of the movie that Campion, in a first-person piece published in The Guardian in 2008, would declare that she never experienced that sort of reaction again.

An Angel at My Table, which uses the triad of Frame autobiographies as its basis, is split up into three sections. In the first, we live in Frame’s middle-class childhood, which was sullied by rebellion and tragedy. (Two of her sisters died, horrifically, in separate drowning incidents.) We move into her adolescence, during which she begins developing a personal style but also begins suffering from depression and social anxiety. Then we traipse into her young adult life and then her ever-evolving, fully fledged adult years, which were first characterized by gainful educational periods, then impaired by a series of stays in psychiatric institutions (the author often was the one checking herself in). During these stretches, she is played, respectively, by Karen Fergusson, Alexia Keough, and Kerry Fox, who, aside from having their ‘dos revamped into a shock of bushy, orange curls, possess physical similarities that complement how wonderfully they, together, delineate convincing transformation.

A biopic as excellent as An Angel at My Table is a rare animal. Recurrent in the standard biographical movie is a feeling of reenactment: Professional achievements tend to be amplified, with personal specifics either romanticized or truncated for the sake of a shorter running time. The abridgment of a long period might amplify a sense of narrative prioritization, mistakenly, and sometimes frustratingly, elevating a person’s story rather than the person.

An Angel at My Table is anomalous in its approach. Its runtime — a monumental 158 minutes — allows it to be leisurely, and fixate on emotional particulars; the screenwriter Laura Jones does not seem as interested in emboldening Frame’s accomplishments as she is in exhibiting what we perceive to be the writer’s core.

We gather that Frame was, essentially, a depressed, outwardly timorous, but brilliant woman who could transform herself into someone exacting when she wrote. The hospital stays, which at one moment climaxed in a schizophrenia misdiagnosis, were nearly detrimental to Frame’s personal growth. It was her writing, it is suggested, that kept her pushing. A lesser movie would attempt to build a cheer-summoning, “feel-good” arc. It could have been idolatrous, or tried to build on the romantic notion of the “tortured artist.” But Campion and Jones strive to portray Frame’s life for what it was: something of a vortex that, in spite of its many triumphs, would never be elementary.

I love the minute details Jones inserts in the script. There is a scene, during the first act, where Frame is writing a poem for class at home, and her older sister tries to change the phrasing of a certain stanza because it doesn’t sound “poetic.” Later, when Frame’s teacher is reading the piece aloud, we discover that the girl didn’t listen to her sibling’s advice — she had faith in her instincts less than a decade into her life. Toward the film’s middle, when Frame discovers that The Lagoon and Other Stories has been published, the fact that there is a hard copy of her work doesn’t much matter after she finds out that there is no photograph of her next to the biographical blurb. During the final part of the film, during which Frame has her first romantic relationship with a sweet but untalented writer, there comes a post-coital beat when her flame reads her one of his poems, and Frame has to pretend to like it. It is an unheard-of moment where Frame appears in touch with her preeminence. Jones never seems to be making A Point with these details; Jones’ screenplay is so degreed that you almost overlook them at first.

I echo the rapturous response to An Angel at My Table some 30 years ago. The movie’s candor makes you almost fall for Frame; like Campion in 1982, you might even see the connections, emotional or otherwise, between Frame and yourself. I feel most myself when I’m writing, too, for example. That there are not more biopics as lucid as this one makes me meditate on how many dramatized biographical stories could have resonated, but didn’t, because Campion was not behind the camera, Jones not doing the writing.