Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee bring heart and realness to this wistful, unromantic comedy about the fragility of creative ambition and a bygone, bohemian New York lost to a consumerist era of gentrification and influencers.
Willem Defoe’s performance is so natural it barely looks like acting at all.
Late Fame 2025
Turn-of-the-century Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler’s sharp, psychological novellas of desire and delusion have barely aged a day. Stanley Kubrick adapted one for Eyes Wide Shut, and now another has been updated to present-day New York City by American director Kent Jones: the Austrian’s posthumously published story Late Fame.
Willem Dafoe is brilliant as Ed Saxberger, an unassuming post office worker. He is approaching his twilight years, but still has a glint of the street smart, intellectual edge that coloured his youth as a poet in the downtown scene. The slender book of verse he once published is now all but forgotten, until a handful of students desperate to start their own movement seek him out.
What follows is a bittersweet, unpredictable satire of the literary pretensions of a new, moneyed crowd pushing up rents and hollowing out culture. And, through the dramatic but fragile Gloria (a show-stealing Greta Lee), an associate of the group that sparks Saxberger’s curiosity, it is also an ode to the rarest, most unexpected kind of creative light, in perpetual, defiant renewal.
- Carmen Gray