First Reformed

Paul Schrader has always been an amazingly protean filmmaker — going all the way back to the late ’70s, when the fabled screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” first stepped behind the camera, leaping from “Blue Collar” to “American Gigolo,” from “Cat People” to “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” from “Affliction” to “Auto Focus,” from “Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist” to “The Canyons.” Throughout his career, though, there are myths, memes, and motifs that remain quintessentially Schraderian: the whole story of his repressed Calvinist upbringing and how it resulted in his never seeing a film until he was in his late teens; his fixation on the “transcendental” high rhapsodic austerity of Bresson, Dreyer and Ozu; and, through all the pointy-headed fixation, the way that he retained a down-and-dirty B-movie grandiosity.

Schrader’s “First Reformed” spans those high/low, art/pulp obsessions with a reach as arresting as it is (knowingly) nutty. The movie is about a pensive, melancholy reverend in upstate New York, played by Ethan Hawke, who finds redemption in the prospect of becoming a suicide bomber. Taken literally, the film is borderline absurd, yet “First Reformed” feels like a testament. It’s like some purple but restrained drive-in-movie version of the Complete Schrader — think “Diary of a Country Priest” meets “Rolling Thunder.” That’s its limitation (this does not exactly have the makings of a megaplex hit), but also, if you’re a Schrader fan, its fascination.