I am constructing a wrapper function for bash 5.1 that would wake a command, and indent its output. If the command fails, then I want the wrapper to pass the command return code to the caller

indent() {
    local com_out=$($* 2>&1)
    local exit_code=$?
    echo -e "$com_out" | awk  '{ print "   │" $0 }'
    return $exit_code
}

However, I don't understand why it always return 0:

$ indent cp a b  
    │cp: cannot stat 'a': No such file or directory
$ echo $?
0

If I run the commands one at the time in my shell (zsh), replacing $* with an actual command, I get that $exit_command is indeed 1.