Late Fame puts Willem Dafoe front and center—a rare place for him, but one he unsurprisingly holds with a quiet humility. Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, a New York City postal worker who published a seminal collection of poetry in 1979, but has long been forgotten by literary society. When Ed is “re-discovered” by an aspiring writer (Edmund Donovan) and introduced to his group of young artists and intellectuals (they call themselves the “Enthusiasm Society”), Ed’s penchant for creativity is rekindled, to mixed results. With its thinly imagined supporting characters—both the artistes Ed falls in with and the gruff mail workers at his local pool hall—Late Fame offers a less realized world than that of director Kent Jones’ previous feature, Diane, which followed Mary Kay Place’s sixtysomething widow as she cared for friends and neighbors in her rural Massachusetts community. Perhaps this is because Kent wrote the script for Diane, while here he is working from a screenplay by Samy Burch (May December), who is adapting an Arthur Schnitzler novella. The outer edges of Late Fame feel a bit unformed and even rushed, as if the world and its characters needed more time to ferment. Yet Dafoe is not only strong throughout, but also gets a signature, standout moment of performance: Ed’s initially reluctant, yet slowly revelatory, reading of one of his poems, where the words—and the complicated memories that come with them—play out across that great, grinning face. Greta Lee, as an aspiring actress who hangs around the fringes of the society, also has two stunning moments of performance within her performance, including a wrenching monologue at a recital that taps into the film’s undercurrent of melancholy. Credit Kent and Burch for not offering something blandly inspirational with Late Fame, but rather a movie that’s at once animated by artistic appreciation and tinged with a realistic sense of regret.
(8/19/2026)
