Noah Hawley may be the first director who has ever had to narrow his focus to do a movie set in outer space.

Hawley, 52, has long established himself in more expansive mediums. As a television creator, he is known for the Emmy-winning anthology series “Fargo,” adapted loosely from the Coen brothers’ darkly comic movie, and for “Legion,” a dense, surrealistic series based on an X-Men antihero, both for FX. As a novelist, he has written five books , the latest of which, “Before the Fall” (2016), has been optioned for the big screen by Sony Pictures.

With the premiere last weekend of “Lucy in the Sky,” Hawley added feature-film director to his résumé, just in time to start shooting Season 4 of “Fargo” in Chicago about two weeks later. (The series is the subject of his forthcoming book, “Fargo: This Is a True Story,” due Oct. 29, a compendium of scripts, interviews and other ephemera from the show.)

“Lucy” tells the story of Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman), an astronaut who returns from space to find that her suburban married life has lost its flavor. An existential crisis prompts an affair with a rakish older astronaut (Jon Hamm), which prompts a different kind of crisis — involving duct tape and a gun. The story is loosely based on the life of Lisa Marie Nowak , an astronaut who in 2007 was arrested in Orlando wearing a trench coat, wig and diaper after driving more than 950 miles to assault a romantic rival.