A Former New York Film Festival Programmer Becomes the Programmed with Late Fame

So many people come to New York City hoping to find an artistic home, somewhere to express themselves and to belong among likeminded creative people. Plenty of them eventually leave. But some stick it out even if great success or lasting community never arrives. There’s plenty to do even without a book deal or an unofficial club; teach, for example, or ply a trade, or work at the post office. The latter is exactly what Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) has been doing for decades when Late Fame begins. Saxberger, as you will grow weary of hearing him called by film’s end, published a book of poetry nearly half a century earlier, and never broke through beyond the cloud of artists that eventually dissipated. He never made it to the literary canon.

That’s not how it feels to Meyers (Edmund Donovan), however, a young man who shows up at Saxberger’s door. Meyers has read the older man’s book, and feels astonished, even grateful, that this author remains so accessible to regular people. Not that Meyers has designs on the humdrum everyday life. He’s part of an artists’ collective – poets, playwrights, essayists, and one older actor – that seeks to reject the tech-driven banality of normal contemporary existence and make art with passion and meaning. In other words: They are young people.

Saxberger reacts to the group with modesty, initially resisting Meyers as he invites his idol for drinks, dinner, anything. But the old poet isn’t immune to flattery, nor to a break from his routine of drinks (non-alcoholic for him) and pool with his blue-collar buddies at the local dive. He therefore allows Meyers and his crew to bask in his presence, and earnestly answers their excited questions about his past. He’s further lured in by the presence of Gloria (Greta Lee), the aforementioned actor, and seemingly the only female member of the group. Gloria is more of a genuine adult than her compatriots, if still a few decades Saxberger’s junior, and carries herself with a theatrical, flirtatious sense of mystery. Lee has to really go for it as this self-consciously New York Character, and her performance deepens whenever Gloria’s pretensions, or mock-pretensions, or whatever they are, slip. I’m not sure I bought her relationship with these young artists who seem vanishingly unlikely to offer her any more than their diverted attention. But then, I’m not sure Gloria is meant to fully buy any of it herself.

Dafoe, of course, is eminently convincing. He’s the primary feature of Late Fame’s disguise, concealing its true identity as a late-2000s Woody Allen dramedy. Director Kent Jones and screenwriter Samy Burch are adapting a novel by Arthur Schnitzler, an Austrian author who died in 1931, and whose short story “Rhapsody” served as the source material for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. That movie took on a dreamlike, displaced quality, using London soundstages to depict wee-hours Manhattan of the late ’90s. Late Fame more straightforwardly updates the material, not always with great success. Despite the group’s tirades about social media and obvious affectations, their bonhomie doesn’t feel all that lived-in – at one point, they refer with derision to the aspiring influencers across the room in their favored coffee shop/bar/hangout. Is that where social media drones really hang out? In silently eye-rolling coffee-klatch cliques somewhere near the West Village?