Late Fame Review: The Old Guy’s Still Got It

Given Coyote vs. Acme’s tortured history (that Warner Bros. Discovery anvil drop) and Late Fame’s winding festival flight path, it’s unlikely the two films’ shared screenwriter, Samy Burch (May December) anticipated them both arriving in movie theatres at the same time. Could you get much further apart in terms of tone and content? Maybe not, but the strange ways a career can unfold is a point of interest in Late Fame.

Director Kent Jones knows something about that, too, having built a reputation over decades as an acclaimed film critic, archivist, and festival programmer before making his narrative feature debut, Diane, in 2019. Late Fame is not as emotionally resonant as Diane, nor as inventively assembled as his 2015 documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, but you can see how this latest film builds on what came before in the ways it considers the creative life, aging, and how a person self-identifies.

What defines us – our job? The company we keep? The time and place we felt most ourselves? Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a New Yorker and postal worker in his late 60s, reads at first glance as working class – just one of the guys at the local watering hole. But when he’s spotted on the street by a fan one day, we learn Ed had a whole other life in the late 1970s in the Downtown arts scene (the film’s breadcrumbs suggest he was a second-generation poet in the New York School). Turns out the fan, a self-styled impresario named Meyers (Edmund Donovan), has a scene of his own he’s nurturing called the Enthusiasm Society, into which Ed is pulled with at first bemusement and then genuine thrill.

The society congregates at a bar called Any Old Place – a name that, in its studied casualness, hits the bull’s-eye for this group of arty, affected types who sit for hours and argue over semantics but appear to do not a whole lot of actual creative work. The outlier is Gloria (Greta Lee), a flamboyant actress who calls them all “my boys” with a baby-girl coo. The Enthusiasm Society dominates the story, especially as they plan a public reading to reintroduce Ed to audiences, and it can be a drag. The characters are wanly cast and distinguishable only by their quirks (that one’s the wannabe Bolshevik, that one’s the fresh face who wears a cape). The exception is Donovan’s Meyers, a failed Wes Anderson character in peacoat and mittens who inexplicably gets more backstory than Ed, even as the filmmakers and audience are softly rolling their eyes at this trust fund poseur.  

But not Ed, and that is testament to Dafoe’s marvelously moving performance. From Count Orlok to the Green Goblin, Dafoe has played plenty of outsized characters over the course of his long career, but here, he shows exquisite restraint animating a character who thinks first, and takes his time with it. His Ed is no naif; he’s not taken in by these kids. But he also greets them uncritically and with curiosity – a generous spirit, but one that can be wounded when misunderstood. Dafoe is so alert, so suggestive of great depths to the character, the sum of Late Film feels insubstantial next to his performance. There are layers to excavate in Ed: how poetry still infuses his life, even as has grown remote from his own writing; the way his face opens with pleasure at this unexpected rediscovery of his talents; how he aches at reminders of his advanced age, especially when it’s Gloria doing the reminding.

Like the familiar pretensions and hypocrisies of the Enthusiasm Society’s lost boys, I didn’t find much novelty in Gloria’s swanning. We’ve seen this kind of Sally Bowles cosplay before, and Lee – better known for dramatic work (Past Lives, House of Dynamite) – tracks more when she’s embodying Gloria sans flash, the makeup-free aging actress ground down by the hustle. But she has one transcendent scene, performing cabaret in a timeless club that could have been around back in Ed’s heyday, or Sally’s Weimar days. Lee gets to show off heretofore unseen talents (that voice!), while Dafoe gets to remind everybody what he can do with his magnificent, now-creased face. “You must have been beautiful when you were young,” Gloria whispers to him. He sure is.  

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This article appears in August 28 • 2026.