Late Fame (USA/France 2025: Dir Kent Lee)

Willem Dafoe, an actor who often relishes big parts in smaller films these days, is Ed Saxberger, a poet whose heyday was 1979, although it's strongly suggested that he was a man out of time even in those days (a blast of the eponymous song by no wave artists 'Mars', dating from more or less the same year, plays as we meet him).

Like many before and after him, Saxberger was unable to sustain a living as a writer and ended up, ironically, working for the postal service, living quietly in a small New York apartment and busily ignoring calls from his sister to come and visit his dying brother.

Returning home one day, Ed gets a visitor; an initially shy, preppy guy from his neighbourhood named Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who has recognised Saxberger as the poet from 1970s New York whose volume of poems, entitled 'Way Past Go' and long out of print, once wowed the city.

Meyers fan boys the poet and begs him to meet his friends, a group of very well off New Yorkers keen to rekindle the poetic muse in a place that has long outgrown the beatnik generation, who name themselves 'The Enthusiasm Society', which Saxberger describes as "Victorian". Once under the spell of the group, who deify Saxberger and feel that the world should once more know about him, he's seduced into accepting an offer to write some new work for a poetry 'happening' they're organising. He also meets Gloria (Greta Lee), a vampy singer/actress to whom he's instantly attracted and who seems to like him more for what he represents - a link to a bygone age - than as a person.

But the shine quickly rubs off 'The Enthusiasm Society', whose desire to bring culture back to New York seems like one more thing for bored rich kids to amuse themselves with, and Saxberger is gradually sidelined. In their local coffee shop the group's arch enemies are another similarly entitled bunch, a phone addicted collective called 'the influencers', but after a while it's difficult to differentiate between the two similarly attention seeking parties.

"There's no fool like an old fool" is the saying, and Saxberger's brief rise and fall on the back of Meyer and his gang is painful to watch; it may be my slightly advanced years, but I found nothing here to suggest a comedy. Whatever muse visited the poet in his heyday seems to have long departed, but when it comes to talent the rest of 'The Enthusiasm Society' seem happy - although this is a relative word - to recite other dead poets; the whole idea of the group's event feels increasingly thin and borderline narcissistic.

There are some great elements here, notably Dafoe's Saxberger, whose lined face registers every emotion as, plucked from obscurity, he battles with the aims of the society while losing his heart (which one suspects has been closed off for a long time) to Gloria, clearly a woman with her own demons. Lee is similarly impressive as the many faceted, glamorous but damaged actress (a role destined for Sandra Hüller until a scheduling problem intervened, possibly for the best). Unfortunately the rest of the cast seem a little one dimensional; more importantly where the script should fizz it too often just simmers on a low heat (apologies for mixing the culinary metaphors). I also just didn't get the sense of then and now New York; through Saxberger's eyes his city has changed out of all recognition, but we see too little of it (a problem which also beset Marielle Heller's 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me? with which this movie shares some thematic elements) and we have to rely on the poet's own voice which, strangely because of his original calling, is rather monosyllabic. I couldn't help but be a little disappointed with Late Fame; it has a great setup but fizzles out, and needed a lot more pep.