After decades spent working for the United States Postal Service in New York City, Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) returns home one day to his Soho apartment to discover a visitor waiting for him. Meyers (Edmund Donovan) is an eager young writer who has tracked Saxberger down after discovering a copy of his only published poetry collection, which he devoured in one afternoon sitting in “Foyles on Charing Cross Road” (IYKYK). Saxberger is surprised, but initially touched, though declines the enthusiastic invitation to join Meyers’ literary group. The dogged Meyers is not dissuaded, and after some gentle persuasion, Saxberger’s long-forgotten vanity gets the better of him and he decides to grace the group with his presence.
The jumble of rich boys living on mommy and daddy’s dime fancy themselves the next Beat generation, spending their afternoons and evenings lounging around in coffee shops and bars trying to say something interesting about their hyper privileged lives. Their number permit only one female member, the eccentric actress Gloria (Greta Lee) who most of the group have either an active or past infatuation with. Saxberger is not immune to her charms, taken in by her free spirit and spontaneity. She represents the life that Saxberger thought he would lead when he was a working class boy who moved to New York City in search of an artistic life.
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As the group work towards putting on a literary showcase (which they treat as if it’s an entirely novel concept rather than something that occurs every night in New York City) Saxberger reckons with the years that have slipped by and the diverging path his life took from the one he thought he’d have as a poet. It’s a film in love with the downtown New York of yesteryear – that which Cookie Mueller and William Burroughs haunted and Saxberger has all but forgotten until Meyers careens into his life.
While Samy Burch’s script makes some amusing observations about the fact that the only people who can afford to be artists anymore are rich kids, it’s a far cry from the biting knock-off that was her May December screenplay, and the wistful gazing towards a New York that doesn’t exist any more seems to ignore the many flaws that existed during that period. (It seems unlikely Gloria, an Asian-American woman, would have been readily invited into an all-white-male group and treated as a peer.) Dafoe is serviceable, but poor Greta Lee gets the worse of it, her character a Manic Pixie Litgirl only afforded interiority right at the end of the story. She does what she can, but the Theatre Kid energy makes Gloria a grating presence every time she steps into frame.
Then Late Fame ends, not with a bang but a whimper, never quite finding the heart of its narrative. It’s reminiscent of Owen Kline’s 2021 comedy Funny Pages in its portrayal of an unappreciated genius being discovered by a bright-eyed youth, but Kline’s instincts were sharper and stronger; that film felt like it had a perspective. Kent Jones doesn’t even delivery a compelling eulogy for the lost creative hub of the Big Apple; Late Fame is nostalgic but always gestures at more interesting artists than presenting one of its own.
