It’s a shame I had to see Kent Jones’ Willem Dafoe vehicle, Late Fame, on the Upper West Side at NYFF in mid-September. It was in the wrong neighborhood, the wrong time of year. Late Fame descends from a proud tradition of lovely films by the likes of Ira Sachs or Mike Mills that you take a flier on thanks to limited but strong word of mouth at Angelika, in the midst of a rare free afternoon in October or November, as the sun sets around 5. During another breathless, heated awards season, these indies are my pea coats, my scarves, my wool sweaters, the cozy wardrobe Late Fame is conveniently draped in. They are pleasant respites from the discourse and hyperbole, a cinematic act of listening to vinyl and enjoying a glass of wine alone in a world animated with wit and sharp observation.
The nostalgic film is set in the unlikely locale of SoHo, in its lofts and cramped cafes and bars and cobblestone streets just south of Washington Square Park, a place I’ve never known as a vestige of the “old” New York because I’ve only lived here 20 years. But Kent Jones apparently did, when he moved to the city to briefly attend NYU film school in the late ‘70s before dropping out to become a critic, and finding his own late fame starting in 1999, first as a documentarian, and since 2018, as a narrative feature filmmaker.
Despite being an adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler novella of the same name — written in 1895 but ironically rediscovered and released with a new translation in 2017 — you can see traces of meta-fiction in this latest work. His protagonist Ed Saxberger came to New York at the same time Jones did, chasing bohemian rhapsody downtown as an aspiring poet. By the time the film opens, he’s given up on those dreams and lives an uneventful life, spent between home at his presumably rent-controlled apartment eating solitary tuna salad dinners and ignoring the remote family drama he doesn’t want to involve himself in, work at the post office where he’s been for 37 years, and the occasional pint (of water) with his working class friends at a dive whose idea of poetry is improvised drunken limericks. This humble existence is immediately upended by the introduction of Meyers (Edmund Donovan), a dorky lit fanboy in Victorian cosplay who has tracked his neighbor to where he lives, shared Saxberger’s lost-to-time book of poems Way Past Go with his circle of fellow university-aged writers dressed like Dickensian fops (“The Enthusiasm Society,” who presumably just graduated from Robin Williams’ boarding school English class), and wants to help revive the work, along with this lost gem of a Bukowski-esque talent in what he imagines as a symbiotic act of clout sharing, lending legitimacy to their stubborn, absurd project.
With all due respect to the big, brash, showy, fully committed period piece accents and sci-fi prosthetics performances, real Dafoe lovers know he’s best when he is restrained, when he’s warm and gentle, when he’s vulnerable, when he takes his time and you can watch the constantly working virtuoso react, and think, and breathe, as he does in Late Fame, turning in what might be his best work since The Florida Project. One of his earlier roles that exhibits this quality is a brief cameo in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat. There, Dafoe plays a sculptor on the cusp of 40 who works as an electrician in art galleries as a fallback gig. “I’m glad I never got any recognition. It’s given me time to develop,” he tells a young, hungry Jean-Michel. Jones’ film serves as a thought experiment, finding that electrician several decades later and checking in on whether his premise, that he was better off undiscovered young, turned out to be true. Like Schnabel’s 1996 film, addressing his far more famous and successful peer in the New York ‘80s art world, Late Fame questions the relative and arbitrary nature of success in the arts, in this case through the eyes of a poet who has given up, and has to decide whether to let young idolaters rekindle his ambition and desire for recognition. Much of the joy in this film comes simply in watching Dafoe’s face, as the artist is stunned, touched, and torn by unexpected praise, reacclimating to the pleasant and unpleasant versions of himself that kind of success could provoke.
But this makes the film sound far more grave and weighty than its first two acts are. Jones applies a satirist’s acerbic eye to what has become of SoHo and its children as fish-out-of-water Saxberger melds into this friend group awkwardly, grappling with a city greatly changed, several generations since Saxberger has bothered to check in on it, and the result is an often hilarious comedy of manners. There’s a danger for a film like this to reach for the lowest hanging fruit, a grumpy old New Yorker banging on thin walls, swiping at his generic Gen Z neighbor/piñatas and making awkward references to TikTok and Labubus, and there is the occasional obvious joke (Surprise! They’re all trust fund kids!), but Samy Burch’s screenplay is too clever and nimble to rest on cliché. The Enthusiasm Society is a group of annoying young performative tech refuseniks who present themselves as proudly out of step with the times, absurdly romanticizing poets they’ve never heard of and allowing Dafoe to often play the straight man while his would-be protégés supply the laughs at their own expense. At one point, Saxberger refers to the kids as “Bullshit Poseurs,” and this is right, and why many of the jokes feel both specific and timeless: there have always been goofball dipshits like these guys; this is just the most recent vintage.
It’s a near abdication of my responsibilities that it has taken this long to get to Greta Lee, who knows she has a ham sandwich on her plate and tears into it as “Gloria Gardner,” a sad, extremely hot, thrift store, manic pixie dream Vaudevillian actress/pastiche of a certain age. She keeps her personal life occluded in shadow and serves to both tempt Saxberger and as a cautionary tale for what he could become if he fully re-commits to a life of pursuing his art with these new “friends.” But this situation also leads Late Fame to turn morose and self-serious in its final act, making the understandable mistake of investing in the airless B plot between its two best performances, and asking us to care about the ultimate message of a film that lives more in its cadence than its resolution. Still, as the film meanders to its end, Jones saves his inevitable knockout for the last moment: This has all been a kind of wish fulfillment. Nobody actually reads anymore.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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