Late Fame

Film programmer and critic-turned-director Kent Jones (Hitchcock/Truffaut, Diane) and casting director-turned-Oscar-nominated screenwriter Samy Burch (May December, Coyote vs. Acme) provide a terrific late-career role for the always wonderful Willem Dafoe. I guess we have to start saying Dafoe is in his late career now, even though the 71-year-old actor has always seemed kind of ageless. This picture leans into that and many other aspects of his screen persona. When we think of Dafoe, we think of both an avant-garde artist—a founding member of the 1970s SOHO-based experimental theater company The Wooster Group who has always been up for a challenging or off-the-wall part—and an affable, easygoing, well-liked Hollywood movie star who works all the time. I can't think of another actor for whom those seemingly disparate descriptors apply.

Jones and Burch draw on all of Dafoe's distinctive traits in this engaging character study of a former bohemian New York poet named Ed Saxberger, who gave up writing decades ago and has since lived a quiet life working for the post office and shooting pool with his blue-collar buddies at a local bar. Saxberger gets plucked from obscurity when an eccentric group of young wannabe artists discover his only published volume of poetry and invite him into their circle, hoping to capitalize on his genius and rekindle his artistic passion. Saxberger is flattered by the attention and enjoys sliding into a de facto mentor role for these pretentious youths and the mysterious older actress Gloria (Greta Lee) who is part of their group. But is Saxberger a mentor or mascot? Are these pseudo-intellectuals truly inspired by his work, or are they just pleased with themselves for rediscovering a forgotten working-class virtuoso unappreciated in his time and now neglected by the culture?

The picture takes place in an underutilized milieu. Contemporary filmmakers don't make movies about how ignorant, obnoxious, and delusional young people are because the industry has been falling all over itself for years to make empowerment cinema that presents people under twenty-four as having figured out all the answers to themselves, their identities, and their world. So it's refreshing to spend so much time with a group of incredibly silly, entitled youths pumping themselves up with lofty ideas they've barely explored but are sure are correct and important.

Of course, it helps that this collective of wannabes are extremely privileged white boys, as we still get to laugh at that demographic. These are the kind of kids whose families commercialized all the outsider art forms they covet and gentrified all the parts of New York that birthed the artists they look up to. Watching Late Fame, I was reminded of Whit Stillman's debut feature Metropolitan, about a semi-outsider entering a similar group of privileged prep-school and Ivy League-shaped swells. Like Stillman, Jones and Burch provide enough nuance to let us understand the appeal of this milieu while mocking it. We can see why someone would want to be part of a group like this, which is so important for this type of story and for its protagonist.

Dafoe gives one of his very best performances here, showing us in minute detail how Saxberger is transformed by this experience. It's little things: how he walks, how he dresses, the way he interacts with others. He's even able to make the film's weakest aspect, his attraction to the actress, feel credible. Unfortunately, this narrative thread, which much of the third act hangs on, doesn't work as well as the rest of the movie. Lee overplays the wannabe diva, and Burch's script takes a few too many turns down cliché alley. Sandra Hüller was originally cast as Gloria, and one can imagine what this picture would have been like if Gloria had been played by someone a bit older, with a screen persona we associate with being more closed off and inscrutable. Lee has practically built her career on pragmatic, plainspoken, what-ya-see-is-what-ya-get individuals.

The film was adapted from a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, whose explorations of bourgeois life in turn-of-the-century Vienna seem like excellent fodder for stories set in late-stage American capitalism, where the privileged classes seem lost as to what to do with themselves when there's nothing left to own and nothing new to create.