Molly Shannon in Wild Nights with Emily (Greenwich Entertainment)

Students of English may remember the delicate poems of Emily Dickinson. And they may recall the sickly-looking Daguerreotype of the reclusive poet, looking every inch the shy loner she was reputed to be. Director and writer Madeleine Olnek has a hoot sending up and tearing down Dickinson’s priggish image in Wild Nights with Emily, providing her with secret passions, a rowdy sex life, and a host of naughty habits one Dickinson foe purrs are “scurrilous but true.”

Along the way Olnek celebrates the writer’s work and makes feminist points on the difficulty of a woman’s finding her voice in a world run by men. But these worthy statements fall by the wayside in the director’s full-on humorous assault, which ranges from zany to outrageous to that most currently in-vogue strain, the cringeworthy. The effect can be exhilarating and disorienting at once.

Bringing some of her awkward sass from Saturday Night Live, Molly Shannon plays Miss Dickinson with toughness and vulnerability. The poet has a busy emotional life, indeed, although it takes a while to piece it together. That’s because Olnek has chosen to tell some of the tale through an unctuous and highly unreliable narrator: the odious, meddling Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz), cack-handed editrix of Dickinson’s poetry and mistress of Emily’s brother Austin, himself married to Emily’s longtime lesbian lover Susan (Susan Ziegler). The film enjoys cavorting though the complicated relationships between the three, setting Emily galloping out her mistress’s door, followed by a shout of “Take your bloomers!”

Wild Nights showcases Dickinson’s poems sensitively with artistic graphics. Characters shower her with praise and lament that publishers have turned her powerful work down. But then the movie will bust out with “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” set to a barrelhouse piano version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” or regale us with “Hope is the thing with feathers!” hollered by Mabel Todd’s maniac husband as he’s dragged off to an insane asylum.

Set pieces satirize male cluelessness and condescension; a doddering old judge helpfully mansplains the plot of a Brontë novel called Wuthering Jane (“A plain woman can be loved by a fire victim!”) to an incredulous Emily, an exchange all the funnier because Mabel misrepresents the novel’s rapport as a hot love affair to a roomful of tittering society matrons. Other humor interludes don’t hit their targets as cleanly. They feel a little too random, a little too woke, and a little too spiteful.

Amid the guffaws, Wild Nights offers some savvy observations about human folly. Susan, Emily’s lover, staunchest defender and believer in her work, is also a jealous rival and sometime frenemy. Mabel embodies vanity and a lack of self-awareness. And an environment where everyone’s relationships are grist for knowing gossip cannot bring itself to name a love hidden in plain sight. These insights, along with the dignified handling of Dickinson’s death, give the film some gravitas. But what’ll really stick with you are the scenes mocking sex, particularly when horny heterosexuals do it. “Your sideburn is in my eye” might be as memorable as “I heard a fly buzz when I died.”