Elisabeth Moss stars as Shirley Jackson in Josephine Decker’s gothic, feverish anti-biopic.

At the beginning of Josephine Decker’s “Shirley,” a young woman named Rose Nemser (Odessa Young), reading the story on a train, has a different reaction.

Strangely aroused by the power of Jackson’s writing, she drags her husband, Fred (Logan Lerman), into the lavatory for sex.

The two of them, as it happens, are on their way to Bennington, Vt., where Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) lives with her husband, the literary critic and campus lech Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg).

Fred, a bland and ambitious young scholar, has been hired to assist Stanley with his classes.

Stanley, a prancing intellectual hobbit, is nasty to Fred and creepily nice to Rose, but his bullying and groping are a sideshow.

Shirley imagines Rose — and Rose imagines herself — as the Bennington student whose disappearance figures in “Hangsaman.” Decker and the cinematographer, Sturla Brandth Grovlen, blur the boundaries of realism, interweaving domestic drama and campus sex comedy with scenes of fantasy, so that by the end we are not sure whose hallucination, or what kind of experience, we are witnessing.

At times the academic power games Shirley and Stanley play with Rose and Fred evoke Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” At other moments the volatile connection between Rose and Shirley recalls the fraught creative mentorship in “Madeline’s Madeline,” Decker’s 2018 film about a teenager in thrall to the charismatic leader of a theater company.

In removing this thread, and making the unliterary, uneducated Rose (who dropped out of college to marry Fred) an emblem of fertility, the filmmakers impose a stark separation of roles on Jackson that she herself defied.