HBO miniseries flawed but aided by Adams’ acting

By appearances alone, HBO’s “Sharp Objects” looks to be a likely choice for the show of the summer.

The miniseries (which premiered Sunday) has it all — the right source material (Gillian Flynn’s 2006 psychological crime novel), the right director (Jean-Marc Vallée of “Wild” and “Big Little Lies”), and most of all, the right star, Amy Adams, who is always at home portraying damagedgoods characters who live in the muggy melancholia of the American elsewhere.

Missouri, specifically, where Adams plays Camille Preaker, a St. Louis newspaper reporter with a drinking problem whose editor, Curry (Miguel Sandoval), assigns her to travel to her hometown of Wind Gap (pop. 2,000), down in the state’s rural boot heel, to look into the murder of a young, local girl and the recent disappearance of another. Does Wind Gap have a serial killer?

Camille arrives in Wind Gap with an almost unsurmountable amount of emotional baggage, revealed fleetingly to viewers in Vallée’s dribs-’n’-drabs technique — a hint here, a hint there.

After telling the generally unhelpful police chief (Matt Craven) of her journalistic intentions to write “a thinkpiece” about how a murder affects a small town, Camille finds the coldest shoulder comes from her mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), who, as heir to the town’s hogprocessing plant, is the richest woman around and has the most to lose from unseemly media attention. Adora lives in an exaggerated state of Southern gentility in the family mansion with Camille’s stepfather, Alan (Henry Czerny), an audiophile • “Sharp Objects” is shown at 9 p.m. Sunday on HBO.

who tunes out the household drama, and Camille’s 15-year-old half sister, Amma (Eliza Scanlen).

While the town searches the fields and woods for its latest missing girl, Camille meets Richard Willis (Chris Messina), a Kansas City detective brought in to help with the case. Although reluctant to share information with a reporter, Richard relates to Camille’s alienation from the town and its culture.

With Camille’s blackout drinking binges and Vallée’s artistic disdain for a linear edit, the hallucinatory obfuscation quickly becomes a bit much. “Sharp Objects” is a difficult, languid endeavor, and it’s easy to imagine viewers ghosting after two or three episodes. It’s also maddeningly slow when it comes to plot and, at eight episodes, probably one or two too long.

Moreover, there’s a surprisingly callous disregard for the very subjects that brought us the concept of trigger warnings: Before landing on a probable killer in its latter episodes, “Sharp Objects” is a constant collage of rapey, sexual-abusive imagery and flashbacks. Camille has spelled out her deepest hurts by carving and cutting several years’ worth of relevant words on her body.

Rather than give the issue a thoughtful look, “Sharp Objects” plays it up as a lurid pathway to clues. The fixation on Camille’s scars is a melodramatic misstep.

That said, I can’t deny that I charged through seven hours of “Sharp Objects” with an obsessive appreciation for the effort, propelled mostly by Adams’ complicated portrayal of Camille.