Sandra Hüller, Willem Dafoe Team for Samy Burch Film Late Fame

The film appears to exhibit similar motifs to May December, which also examined the ways in which celebrity and public image interweave with spectacle—albeit through an examination of pedophilia and age-gap discourse. The synopsis reads that the feature explores “the illusory effect of praise on the soul, and the lingering ghostly presence of the past, whether it’s imagined or vividly remembered.” It reads a bit surreal, which presents a potentially fresh lens in approaching an artistic bildungsroman. Here’s hoping that it inclines itself more towards formal and narrative ingenuity rather than regurgitating the subjectivity of artist biopics. 

Kent Jones is set to direct the film, his most recent feature being the domestic drama Diane starring undersung character actors Mary Kay Place and Jake Lacy (of Girls, The White Lotus fame). His previous films also include the documentaries Hitchcock/Truffaut and Letter to Elia, the latter of which he co-directed with Martin Scorsese. If his previous collaborations indicate anything, hopefully it’s that this work will be a part of a throughline of patient, naturalistic work informed by attention to detail rather than by overwrought ideas.

Hafsah Abbasi is a film critic who has covered the Sundance Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival in years past. She currently resides in Berkeley, California. Find her latest writing at https://twitter.com/hafs_uh.