“Klara remembered who she was. She pulled away from the window and she was a sculptor, although she didn’t always believe it, an artist––she believed them sometimes when they said she wasn’t.”
— Don DeLillo, Underworld
It is early into Kent Jones’ Late Fame when Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) joins a coterie of twenty-something wannabe intellectuals for a drink in the Village. This is Saxberger’s scene––better yet, was. A one-time poet, he hasn’t written anything after his first and only book came out in the late 1970s, whereupon he retreated into anonymity, serving as a different man of letters at NYC’s post office for almost 40 years. But when a budding writer one-third his age shows up at his doorstep to beat the drum for his forgotten literary endeavor, Way Past Go, Ed doesn’t quite know how to react. “It’s as if the poems were written yesterday,” Meyers (Edmund Donovan) croons, before inviting the grizzled bard to a drink with his new fans (a token of “inspirationally motivated gratitude”). Ed hesitates; when he finally caves, Jones lingers on Dafoe’s face as the meeting with a rapt audience rekindles something in him. Call that a re-self-discovery: surrounded by a gaggle of youngsters who treat him with reverential respect, Ed is suddenly reminded of who he was, who he still is. Stunned by this epiphany, Dafoe smiles, and the film smiles with him.
Like Diane, Jones’ first narrative feature, Late Fame concerns a middle-aged character reckoning with their younger self. Ed landed in New York in the 1970s––around the time Dafoe himself did––and his Way Past Go radiates a gritty, effervescent energy in the vein of Frank O’Hara and other First Generation New York School poets our man used to schmooze with (in an early standout scene, Meyers et al listen in bated breath as Ed lists the literary giants he’d visit in the neighborhood). That’s all in the past: “I had my moment, and it ended––now it’s your time.” But the gang won’t have it. Having anointed him as their guru, the fabulously named “Enthusiasm Society” invites Ed to present some new stuff at a public reading they’re organizing in the city. No easy feat. Written by Samy Burch, Late Fame is the portrait of an artist who’s lost his mojo; hard as he tries, Ed just cannot bring himself to work again. Watching Dafoe search for inspiration in old tapes of Williams Carlos Williams reciting his own verses, more than once my mind travelled to the time Bob Dylan confessed, in a very candid 60 Minutes interview, that he could no longer write the kind of songs that would magically flow out of him in his 20s. Sure, artists may not have a “prime” in the same way athletes do, but there’s something to be said about the relative ease with which words and ideas can spill from us in youth, and one measure of Late Fame’s perceptiveness is the way it understands how creativity adjusts to different life seasons––how genius, to borrow from another titan of American letters, Edgar Lee Masters, is always a combination of “wisdom and youth.”
This isn’t to peg the film as a dirge. True to its name, the Enthusiasm Society sweeps Ed off his feet, and for a while Late Fame coasts on the alchemy between the old Village bard and the bunch of kids who’d adopted him as one of their own––never mind that Ed’s ideas around art are diametrically opposed to the gang’s. One need not be fluent in the ’70s New York poetry scene to appreciate such a piercing snapshot. Jones captures the boys’ milieu with near-ethnographic attention to its textures, patois, and etiquette; Late Fame is never funnier––or more consistently on-point––than when it turns to these pompous fresh graduates and their quirks. In adapting Arthur Schnitzler’s 1895 novella, Burch can posit Ed’s squad as analogue nostalgists in a digital world. But that, of course, is just one of their many poses. These affluent dandies who call each other by their surnames and pontificate on the role of beauty in society waste no opportunity to namedrop their heroes or rant against smartphones and “sociopath media,” only to reveal they don’t even know whether their role models are dead or alive (can’t invite Gregory Corso to the reading, alas!) and whip up phones mid-conversation.
In a lesser film, these privileged loafers might have come across as caricatures, but Jones doesn’t lampoon them. These are young people trying to find themselves through the art they read and the art they intend to make, and for all their ridiculously formal affectations, there’s an earnestness to their search that makes them oddly relatable. Gradually, Late Fame becomes a hangout film that’s drunk on the prospect of making things happen, and nowhere does that energy feel more palpable than when Gloria (Greta Lee) saunters into it. The only woman in Meyers’s group––and its oldest member, though no one’s ever dared ask her age––Gloria’s an actress who is “greater than life,” Ed is warned, and indeed Lee swans into Late Fame as a tragic heroine who treats the Enthusiasm Society as her extended audience. Tethered as it is to Ed’s creative struggles, the film becomes Gloria’s, to the extent that even the colors of Wyatt Garfield’s cinematography seem to intensify per her moods. Lee gives her character a melodramatic depth without overstating; her theatrical, flamboyant turn makes for a strident contrast with Dafoe’s, but there’s an unspeakable sadness at its center. Gloria’s mystique is a function of her mystery: we don’t know anything about her, and no sooner does Jones allow for a behind-the-scenes peek at her private life than that sadness grows larger, her performance retroactively more tragic.
Ed and Gloria hit it off; halfway through Late Fame, they take shrooms and walk around Soho, with Ed pointing at all the buildings that used to house cash-strapped artists and are now a string of luxury boutiques and yoga studios. “Seasons collide,” a refrain from one of his poems goes, and so do images of the city, New York’s past and present, yet there’s nothing wistful about that endless cycle, nothing romantic about Ed’s memories of those times. Late Fame isn’t a tribute to a bygone era but a much livelier chronicle of different generations clashing and mixing; in the film’s funniest moments, Dafoe tries to blend in with his new young posse with the same ease of Steve Buscemi infiltrating high schools in 30 Rock. While Ed may struggle to write, he doesn’t seem particularly bitter about it. Whether he ever will again is ultimately irrelevant. He did it once and got to live in a “dark, glittering asphalt Mecca,” to borrow from Way Past Go, at a time when people “made everything happen and never stopped.” Even a relatively formulaic denouement cannot soil this towering study of a creative who may have lost his spark but not his wonder for his magical turf and its strange residents––young and old, established artists and professional posers, all the myriad stories and faces that make up New York.
Late Fame screened at the 63rd New York Film Festival.