Kent Jones’s 2025 comic drama Late Fame takes full advantage of the age and experience etched in Willem Dafoe’s face. Dafoe plays 64-year-old New York City postal worker Ed Saxberger, who quit high school, moved to the city, joined artistic circles, published a book of poetry, and then settled into a quiet life in lower Manhattan.
Those facts matter mainly to Saxberger. Whatever else he has experienced or feels, viewers need to read into Dafoe’s skin, his subdued line readings, and his matter-of-fact body language during Saxberger’s solitary walks and minimal interactions in and around the neighborhood.
One day, a “secret admirer” appears outside Saxberger’s home. An academically trained aspiring poet in his 20s, Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), has found a copy of Saxberger’s long-out-of-print book and been wowed by it. He introduces himself to Saxberger, then introduces Saxberger to his group of aspiring writers, mostly men, also in their 20s.
Saxberger hasn’t been longing for recognition, personal or artistic, as Dafoe’s expert unfolding from wariness to grinning makes clear. The forgotten poet takes the bait, however, and moves that much more jauntily in response to his “late fame”.
Screenwriter Samy Burch’s dialogue keeps feeding viewers bits of information about these characters, but even the expository dialogue feels true. Encouraged to enjoy one drink on a friend’s birthday, Saxberger happily declines because he hasn’t had a drink in six years; we assume the backstory that led to this moment. All the while, we infer vital information from, say, the contrasts between Dafoe’s physicality and the young actors’, or between the stark, blue bar where Saxberger socializes with his working-class peers and the warmer, cushioned salon where the “rich kids” foment their artistic revolution.
Burch has transplanted Arthur Schnitzler’s posthumously published 1895 novella of the same title from Vienna, and the result has clearly been made by people who love New York City, even now, when the cost of living might prevent a 17-year-old Saxberger from establishing a foothold in the city. Late Fame knows what it means to cultivate the belongings in your apartment, cherish that place as a refuge, but also need and want to get out, soak up the city’s energy, and luxuriate in its still-thrilling atmosphere.
In this mash note to Downtown Bohemia, the camera pans across Saxberger’s bookshelves to show a collection of Pauline Kael film reviews, a Samuel Beckett novel, poetry cassettes, and other treasures, with the same care that it sweeps across low-rise buildings and the tall old trees of Washington Square Park.
Saxberger likens Meyers to a character in an Edith Wharton novel, and as in Wharton, social mores and stratifications play out. Think of The Age of Innocence (1993), the Wharton adaptation directed by Martin Scorsese, one of Late Fame’s executive producers. Update that portrait of high society in Gilded Age Metropolis with Whit Stillman’s depiction of a young Upper East Side bourgeoisie in Metropolitan (1990). Add realistic urban charm from different walks of life, maybe out of Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey (1988), and urban isolation, as in Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was… (1994). Yes, if you like those films and others like them, you’ll like Late Fame.
Although it acknowledges the 21st-century ubiquity of cellphones and influencers, Late Fame bears a touch of belatedness, of old-worldiness. Its moody soundtrack includes Lou Reed’s “Charlie’s Girl”, from his 1975 album Coney Island Baby. Its poetic touchstones include the modernists, the Beats, and the New York School. The story speeds up when it needs to, but it’s never frenetic.
Even while laying out a plot we care about and may be moved by, the film takes time to observe birds, manhole covers, and e-bike-delivery people weaving through traffic. If Late Fame sometimes suggests Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), that’s because Schnitzler authored the 1926 novella that was Kubrick’s source, but unlike the stiff Eyes Wide Shut, Late Fame feels consistently alive and observant even in its nostalgia.
Viewers who don’t love New York or cities generally might not appreciate this film, and therefore some cultural references may be lost on them. Still, the wisdom—about life, love, change, truth, creativity, and so much more—packed into its hour and 36 minutes is accessible to open-minded adults. It might help to have lived and lost a bit, but no such experience is required. In a scene where Saxberger absorbs some relationship-changing news, Dafoe’s profile reveals what you need to know.
The camera adores the one woman associated with Meyers’s group, Gloria (Greta Lee). She’s not a writer; she’s a performer, a singer and actress, “larger than life”, full of talent but complicated to the point of being dangerous to herself and others. Lee embodies this role as fully as Dafoe et al. do theirs—all the performances are terrific—but she brings a spark, a flinty wildness, a deliciousness but a woundedness. Her performance illustrates what all the fuss is sometimes about in being an artist, especially when the stakes can be high personally and professionally.
I’ve seen Late Fame twice—not on assignment but as a paying customer at New York’s Film Forum, a beloved cultural institution that makes a quick cameo appearance in the film—because I wanted to reexperience so many moments, from glimpses of streets to emotionally complex interactions to Lee’s long, bravura performance of a Kurt Weill song. I’m basically this film’s target audience, and I’m looking forward to a third viewing, yet I hope Late Fame reaches viewers far beyond the expected. Every aspect of the production is stellar. I anticipate Academy Award nominations for this film, and I’m not just saying that because—full disclosure—the editor, Mike Selemon, is married to one of my coworkers.
Young people, whether they identify with the characters or perceive the story’s ironies or not, could take to its images and sequences with the same fervor they’ve embraced Broadway’s plays, or the films Rent or Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Late Fame has so much worthwhile material that, into the future, it could serve as a touchstone. Remember the first time you saw it?