Singer and songwriter Dua Lipa has performed her music on “Saturday Night Live” before, but for the first time, she pulled double duty as guest host and musical act. The sketch-heavy show didn’t try to surround her with a bunch of cameos or five-timers jackets or anything gimmicky this week. Except for a “Weekend Update” appearance by Jerry Seinfeld, who was there to promote his new Netflix movie “Unfrosted, and a musical introduction by actor and musician Troye Sivan, Lipa was mostly left to her own devices to show if she could “give you everything” as she promised in her monologue.

The result? A mixed bag of sketches that were neither derailed by the singer nor really elevated much by her presence. Except for a funny filmed homage to “The Elephant Man,” she was either relegated to secondary parts that didn’t require her to carry a scene, or dropped in for a few lines and then made to disappear. At least two of the sketches were repeats of ones from previous episodes, including a Young Spicy sketch about voiceover artists recording inappropriate rap song intros, and the return of phone number jingle artists Soul Booth at the end of the show. Elsewhere, Lipa played a woman with a Sonny Angel doll collection come to life who wants to recreate the vibe of the new movie “Challengers,” a wearer of very tiny activist pins on the red carpet, and an eater of penne alla vodka, which is always there for us in its bland, comforting way. She also was a nurse for a BBQ pitmaster turned OB-GYN named Fat Daddy.

If nothing else, this episode whetted the appetite for next week’s return of Maya Rudolph as host.

As musical guest, Dua Lipa performed “Illusion,” introduced by Sivan, and “Happy For You,” introduced by Seinfeld.

This week’s cold open eschewed White House politics or Trump court drama for a look at how parents are reacting to recent student protests at college campuses. The backdrop was a show, “Community Affairs with Ryan Abernathy,” whose host (Michael Longfellow) asked parents of New York college students what they think about their kids protesting (presumably for Palestine). The joke was that Alphonse Roberts (Kenan Thompson), parent of a Columbia student, isn’t worried about his kid Alexa Vanessa Roberts because she is not protesting. “She better have her butt in class. I’m supportive of y’all’s kids protesting, not my kids,” he said. “Free this, free that. I’ll tell you what’s not free: Columbia.” He talked about the jobs he’s working to help pay for $68,000 a year in tuition so that his daughter can get a degree in African-American studies and how he’s looking forward to going to her graduation while in deep denial that commencement might be canceled.

In her monologue, Lipa (or as she’s come to accept, “Dula Peep”) showed off her parents in the audience, who named her Dua, Albanian for “Love,” and Lipa “Albanian for my last name.” The singer said her parents party as hard as she does, recounting how she ran into them late one night at a London club. She talked about her new album “Radical Optimism” and gave examples of it to cast members in the audience who recounted their sad situations, like being dumped or being told by a doctor to stop drinking. Lipa’s advice: “There’s always poppers!” But she cut off one audience member — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (Heidi Gardner) — before she could ask anything. She joked about the “lazy dance” meme that she’s embraced over time and promising to do the opposite as guest host. “I’m gonna give you everything! I’m making the wigs, I’m dealing Adderall to the writers, I’m doing it all!”

Best sketch of the night: ‘The Anomalous Man’ has swagger

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The black-and-white pre-taped sketch features Sarah Sherman as an Elephant Man-like playwright named Peter who has claw hands, a pig’s snout for an ear and a gigantic eye on his back. A woman named Emily (Lipa) meets Peter and shows him affection he says he’s never felt before. The two start to fall in love, but the first night they share a bed together, she’s awoken by the sound of text messages. Peter, it turns out, has multiple phones and multiple women he’s planning to bed, sending messages like, “POV: You’re about to get railed by a weirdo.”

Also good: Explaining the Kendrick Lamar-Drake feud

On the TV show “Good Morning, Greenville,” the hosts (Gardner and Mikey Day) cluelessly try to explain the escalating feud between rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake, which came to a head Friday with the release of three diss tracks and was followed by a fourth on Saturday night. Hilariously, the two hosts try to include their Black weatherman (Devon Walker), who asks to be left out of the very uninformed and basic discourse. A piano teacher (Lipa), who considers Elton John lyrics to be rap, tries to decipher the tracks and comes to the conclusion that Drake is Canadian and that Kendrick’s shoe size is being scrutinized. The cringe level reaches its pinnacle when the hosts try to squash the beef with cutouts of Drake and Lamar’s faces they use as puppets. “Nah,” the weatherman says as he leaves the studio.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: Cricket is a good boy

This week’s “Weekend Update” had three guests, including Chloe Fineman revising her JoJo Siwa impression to chronicle her new “bad girl” image, and Seinfeld discussing the fatigue of doing too much press for his new movie, with a warning specifically for Ryan Gosling. But it was Marcello Hernandez who had the most impact with his portrayal of Noem’s other puppy, Cricket the 7th, who defended the governor while apparently suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The canine insisted the first six Crickets were bad dogs, while he hoped for a long life. A talking button set the canine uses begged to differ with messages including, “She is going to kill me tonight,” and “I die tonight.” “I’m a good boy!” the dog insisted as the segment concluded.

Flannery O’Connor’s thrillingly hard-edged tales about the unreconstructed South and its redemption-deficient malcontents will never lose their power to scratch us awake with their violence, humor and ugly truth.

Such great, complicated artists don’t deserve the shallow cradle-to-grave treatment common to so many biopics, and thankfully, Ethan Hawke’s new film “Wildcat” isn’t that. Rather, it’s a soulful, pointed and unconventional grappling with the mysteries of the deeply Catholic, norm-shattering Georgia native’s life and work. Concentrated on a pivotal time of promise and disappointment during O’Connor’s 20s, when her writing was getting noticed (as was the lupus that would eventually consume her), it’s anchored with aching intelligence by Hawke’s daughter Maya (“Stranger Things”), unrecognizably severe in cat’s-eye glasses and a frail countenance.

The Hawkes deliver a portrait of O’Connor in all her fiercely self-aware outsiderdom, whether standing firm against a patronizing New York editor (Alessandro Nivola) who believes she wants to “pick a fight” with her readers, or sternly defending her faith against glib comments at an Iowa Writers’ Workshop party. But we also see this O’Connor in weaker moments, shrinking in the presence of her protective mother, Regina (Laura Linney), when forced back home because of her illness, and almost crumbling in the presence of a priest (a wonderful Liam Neeson). Ethan Hawke’s screenplay, co-written with Shelby Gaines, was inspired by the letters to God that O’Connor wrote at the time, published posthumously as “A Prayer Journal” in 2013.

This stretch of ambition and setback from an all-too-short life is not all that’s served up in “Wildcat.” Maya Hawke’s acting duties also involve playing an assortment of O’Connor’s characters in abridged dramatizations of short stories — “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Parker’s Back,” and a few other classic pieces. In the ones where bold, brash men bring thunder and change to unsuspecting young women (all Maya), scene partners Steve Zahn, Rafael Casal and Cooper Hoffman do memorable work.

These segments diverge in tone, color and movement from the muted palette and fixed compositions with which cinematographer Steve Cosens girds the biographical narrative. But they’re expertly threaded in, suggesting how a creative loner can experience flare-ups of imagination when the world reveals itself. Movies often struggle with conveying writerly inspiration, but these swatches earnestly make good on a potent quote of O’Connor’s that Hawke opens with: “I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

Linney, meanwhile, at the top of her game, is another constant in multiple roles, vividly rendering a handful of O’Connor’s fictional mothers (including the self-righteous women from “Revelation” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge”). Before she even shows up as poised, old-fashioned Regina, picking up her suffering daughter at the train station, we’ve seen her in a couple of these adaptation bursts (including a clever rendering of “The Comforts of Home” as a trailer for a lurid ’60s B movie).

And yet, surprisingly, Linney’s and Hawke’s doubling duty never comes off as cheap psychologizing of the writer’s relationship with a parent who didn’t get her. It feels broader than that. (At the same time, O’Connor’s own views on race, the source of much reputational reassessment, aren’t exactly laid bare here, but neither are they ignored.) The symbolic payoff in Ethan Hawke’s brilliant use of his daughter and Linney is that we grasp both the intense narrowness of O’Connor’s subject matter as well as the rich versatility within her gothic archetypes.

Coming on the heels of director Ethan Hawke’s excellent docuseries “The Last Movie Stars,” about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, “Wildcat” shows that his gifts in front of the camera are being complemented behind it, too, especially when the subject is a life woven through with art, passion and pain.