Late Fame

Kent Jones’s Late Fame (a highlight of the 63rd New York Film Festival), based on Arthur Schnitzler’s only recently discovered late 19th century novella, adapted for the screen by Samy Burch (Todd Haynes’s May December) gives both Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee a chance to show us a side of their acting skills we haven’t seen before.

Greta Lee’s breathtaking rendition of the 1929 Brecht/Weill song Surabaya Johnny forms the pulsating, disquieting core of Jones’s second feature (after Diane, starring Mary Kay Place, a Tribeca Film Festival 2018 highlight, winning Best Cinematography for Wyatt Garfield, and the Founders Award for Best US Narrative Feature and Best Screenplay). The past comes back in layers, brittle, shatterable, delicate, with cinema as the perfect medium to probe memory. Dafoe is Ed Saxberger, who one night returning home from his job at a Downtown New York post office finds an eager admirer named Meyers (Edmund Donovan) waiting for him on the sidewalk. The young man, wearing somewhat old fashioned garb (wittily sparkling costume design by Carisa Kelly), compliments his idol on his book of poetry, published many decades ago and long-forgotten by the world at large, and invites him to join his group of young writers for their jour fixe at a nearby café.

Saxberger’s newly found fans, dressed in duffle coats, turtlenecks underneath shirts, and other clothing signifying a love for what was popular in decades past, are so very different from his workplace pals with whom he meets in a pub to eat and play pool, that his heart seems to split into two. Where does he belong? On his bookshelves at home we can quickly spot spines that read Pauline Kael and Beckett’s Murphy. His new friends are half-faking recognition of Robert Creeley or Gregory Corso and their “Enthusiasm Society” is planning a “sincerely ironic throwback,” an old-fashioned reading, to which their new rediscovery shall contribute a fresh poem.

Saxberger wonders about the lack of girls in the group, just in time to be introduced to “larger-than-life actress” Gloria, played by Greta Lee with so much joy and aplomb that the film from then on belongs to her. Her haircut a variation on the bob Pola Negri, Louise Brooks, and Anna May Wong once flaunted, her gestures in homage to Gloria Swanson and Marlene Dietrich - you realize how much you missed women like that in 21st century cinema, where there seems to be so little room for tragic playfulness and twinkling doom. “I have a very high tolerance for despicable men,” says Gloria, a sentence equally funny and profoundly sad. Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express may very well be one of her favourite movies.

Burch and Jones clearly enjoy updating rich kid Myers and his literary salon pals to the present without ever falling into clownish cliché. His loft is “kind of ostentatious,” he admits, as he shows his first edition of Naked Lunch to his new poet friend and calls Parsons nothing more than “expensive daycare”. Part serious admiration, part faking it, Myers sets up Saxberger with a friend in publishing (Jake Lacy) who plays his casual little corporate power games, sporting a Brooks Brothers rugby shirt and a condescending grin, and is interested only in a memoir of the gritty old downtown poetry times.

Maybe because Robert Redford died the day before I was at the screening of Late Fame, I started seeing a resemblance in the rugged folds of Dafoe’s expressive face, an Americanness, so distinct and noble, that it startled me. Eras communicate with each other in cinema and in life.

Kent Jones (who helped make Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P: Psychotherapy Of A Plains Indian sound time-appropriate) has a keen ear for the wrong tone and when he lets the words of Lorine Niedecker’s poem Foreclosure float through the film or shows Emily Dickinson on a stamp the exact moment when Saxberger realises that he did not stop for his brother’s death, it is done with great precision. HD, protector of the palimpsest, is the patron saint of this movie.

Reviewed on: 30 Sep 2025