Late Fame: Kent Jones’s playful drama pokes gentle fun at New York literary circles old and new

The last lines of ‘Famous’, by the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, read “I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,/ or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,/ but because it never forgot what it could do.” At the outset of Kent Jones’s lovely, lambent Late Fame, Ed Saxberger (a perfect Willem Dafoe) seems to have forgotten what he could do – or at least, what he once did. For a moment in the 1970s, before spending 37 years working for the post office, Ed was a poet. He even published one slim, unsuccessful volume of work, titled Way Past Go, before his bohemian days of partying with Cookie Mueller in East Village lofts petered out and life settled into a more humdrum rhythm. Not one without its pleasures, mind you: the New York sun can make the city sparkle even on hat-heavy winter days; Ed lives alone in an apartment not lavish but neat and quiet and book-filled; and if he needs company he can head to a neighbourhood bar to shoot pool and the shit with a knot of blue-collar acquaintances he calls, inevitably, “the guys”.

But one of these bright, cold days, shot warmly by director of photography Wyatt Garfield, he comes home to discover a young man in a white cashmere turtleneck and a black astrakhan hat waiting at his doorstep. He is Meyers (Edmund Donovan) and, to Ed’s amazement, he has read Way Past Go, and is convinced that Ed is an undiscovered genius whom he would very much like to rediscover. Ed demurs modestly but his face immediately looks softer, less craggy, as though someone just switched on his key light. Meyers invites him to meet a group of friends – who differ from Ed’s group by several decades, a trust fund or two and the air of having just strolled off a Whit Stillman movie set – who have formed a self-consciously throwback literary circle called The Enthusiasm Society. Ed declines this first invitation, but the second time he meets Meyers, he goes.

The Society comprises a playwright, an “experimental” writer and Meyers’ wannabe Svengali, along with Brussard (Clay Singer), a critic who prefers the appellation “essayist”, and Winn (Luca Padovan), an eager-beaver aspirant whose absurd youth is exaggerated by his choice of headgear: a 1920s-newsboy tweed cap. But if these cosseted college boys are all struggling to define who they are, they know who they aren’t. Deeply invested in art-for-art’s-sake dogma, they despair of their generation’s shallowness and tech addictions and proudly jeer at the gang of influencers glued to their phones on the other side of the bar (though they’re not so disdainful that Brussard is not covertly hooking up with one of them).

The young men flatter Ed, beg him for stories about Ginsberg – whom he did not know – and insist he participate in a showcase they’re planning. Ed, perhaps fearful of looking like a foolish old man among these bright young things, hesitates. But then he meets actress Gloria (a stunning Greta Lee, imbuing her role with brokenhearted luminosity), a satellite member of the Society, its only woman and a Nobel Laureate in the art of draping herself fragrantly over a scruffy armchair or a park bench and transforming it into a velvet chaise longue. Ed is transfixed by Gloria – he looks at her as though he hasn’t looked at anybody for a long time, like he’s been on a desert island with only crabs and coconuts for company. Perhaps already now he can glimpse something authentic through the cracks in all her artifice – Gloria’s gorgeous cabaret rendition of ‘Surabaya Johnny’ later will attest to her genuine talent. He agrees to write a new poem for her to perform at the showcase. The film, for a time, becomes an insightful two-hander between this older man hesitating on the doorstep of his second chance and this not-quite-young-any-more woman running on the fumes of her first.

Late Fame, written by Samy Burch (May December, 2023) and based on Arthur Schnitzler’s posthumously published novel, is full of characters out of step, deliberately or helplessly, with their times. But Jones does not despise them for it, though he pokes gentle fun. Himself a renowned critic and ex-longtime director of the New York Film Festival, Jones understands better than most that all art exists in conversation with that which came before, and some of those conversations are dumber than others. Meyers’ little brigade may be pretentious, condescending, oblivious to their own privilege and of dubious creative capacity, but they sincerely admire Ed’s 1970s milieu, just as they fashion themselves with affection and affectation after some hazy ideal of a 1920s salon, the kind where Pound could expound on Browning or Byron, who hated Wordsworth but loved Dante and on and on, back into prehistory, when presumably the second generation of cave painters jealously debated the daubings of their predecessors.

Everyone is an anachronism in Late Fame, except for Ed, who is merely old, and New York City, which is merely eternal. When we finally hear some of Ed’s writing (a gorgeous Frank O’Hara-esque love poem written by Jones himself), it begins with his arrival in the “dark glittering asphalt Mecca” of the city he has never left. Here, the consolations of New York are not nothing. Indeed, it is Gloria’s decision eventually to leave, having streaked across Saxberger’s twilight sky like a comet, that makes her Late Fame’s most tragic character.

Even here, the tragedy is only that she’s wanted by a respected theatre company in Minneapolis. But that fate is as close to defeat as this generous, glowing little movie envisages. Everyone else, even the often insufferable Meyers, is brought a little closer to self-knowledge, a little closer to understanding that the greener grass on the other side of the generational divide is best admired from right where you stand. The Society disintegrates. The City endures. And Ed, ruefully amused at the hubris of his brief flirtation with late-life literary celebrity, decides – like a buttonhole or a pulley or a postal worker who once wrote a book of poetry and occasionally plays pool with the guys – to remember what he can do.

► Late Fame is in UK cinemas 4 September.