Imogen Poots takes the lead in Stewart’s choppy but compelling adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of abuse and sexual uncertainty

Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, adapted by her from the 2011 abuse memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, is running a very high temperature, though never exactly collapsing into outright feverishness or torpor. It’s a poetry-slam of pain and autobiographical outrage, recounting a writer’s journey towards recovering the raw material of experience to be sifted and recycled into literary success.

The present day catastrophes of failed relationships, drink and drugs are counterpointed with Super-8 memories and epiphanies of childhood with extreme closeups on remembered details and wry, murmuring voiceovers. It borders on cliche a little, but there is compassion and storytelling ambition here.

Lidia herself, well played by Imogen Poots, is a young woman who was abused in her teenage years by her clenched and furious architect father (Michael Epp) – along with her sister (Thora Birch) who often sacrificed herself to their father’s loathsome attentions to divert him away from Lidia – and their mother went into depressive denial throughout.

Lidia throws herself into being a fanatically focused swim team champ which gets her a college scholarship that she messes up through booze and coke. The film shows how in the water she feels free; swimming laps against the clock gives her a purpose and an escape – a cancellation of identity.

But now Lidia has a terrible secret: it is not merely that she is an abuse survivor – she masturbates incessantly thinking about it, and utterly despises her weak-beta male boyfriend (Earl Cave) for being nice and gentle. (That, and being spanked by her swim coach, is also a complicating factor for her interest in BDSM.)

So when her artistic opportunity arrives, so does a toxic crisis of daddy issues. Her attempts at writing get her the chance to participate in an experimental collaborative novel being masterminded by the counterculture legend Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) whose interest in her appears unsettlingly like her father’s. Is history repeating itself? Is degradation the price you pay for success in writing – or swimming – or anything? Her own writerly evolution is shown by the books she reads herself – Vita Sackville-West’s biography of Joan of Arc as a kid, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as a student, and then, as a young writer, Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless.

These personal stories and their movie versions have been undermined recently by notorious fake memoirist JT LeRoy – whose alter ego Savannah Knoop was actually played by Kristen Stewart in a screen version of her troubled life.

But for all that, and some callow indie indulgences, this is an earnest and heartfelt piece of work, and Stewart has guided strong, intelligent performances.