2 September 2026

Late Fame is a story of snatched youth

Willem Dafoe plays a poet who’s mystified by his own revived fortunes

The Austrian Jewish writer Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Late Fame, written in 1895, came late to fame itself. After he failed to get it serialised, the finished typescript remained in his archive, transferred for safekeeping to Cambridge University Library in 1938. There it stayed, unread, until it was discovered and published for the first time in 2014.

It’s a sardonic account of a solitary, elderly Viennese office worker, Saxberger. In his youth, Saxberger had published one volume of poetry – now forgotten, including by its author. One day a young man calls on Saxberger, telling him the book is a masterpiece and much admired by the group of young writers he leads (satirically modelled on the avant-garde “Young Vienna” movement Schnitzler himself belonged to). Flattered, the former poet meets his fans and they plan a reading to relaunch his career. Smitten with an affected, slightly older actress among them, Saxberger rashly promises to write his first new work for decades for her to perform.

Late Fame would seem to be a story irretrievably locked into its turn-of-the-century Viennese setting. But it has been brilliantly relocated to contemporary New York by screenwriter Samy Burch (best known for the 2023 black comedy May December, directed by Todd Haynes, about an actress studying a sex offender in order to play her in a film).

This script, gentler to all its characters than its source, has found the ideal director in Kent Jones. An ultimate cineaste, Jones has been a film critic, the director of the New York Film Festival and a long-term collaborator with Martin Scorsese. He has previously made a documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut, in 2015, and a seriously good feature that he scripted as well as directed, Diane, in 2018. In the latter, Mary Kay Place plays a woman in her sixties trying to support her addict adult son as well as others in her community, while racked by guilt about the infidelities and abandonments of her youth: a reckoning with the past that has obvious affinities with Late Fame.

What makes Late Fame work so well is one piece of casting. As Ed Saxberger, Willem Dafoe, now 71, gives one of the great performances of his prolific career. The film’s version of the character has him as a New York School poet in his youth who, for the last 37 years, has been working as a letter sorter in the post office.

In the past, Dafoe has been memorable as a villain (Green Goblin in Spider-Man) and a hero (Sergeant Elias in Platoon). Here he plays a part that is neither: just a regular guy who, having aged out of all his dreams, has them revived for him by a new generation he only tentatively trusts. He’s surprised, bewildered, sceptical, excited, flattered, amused, baffled and dismayed by turn. Dafoe conveys it all so directly, in his body language and facial expression. His extraordinary countenance, positively saurian, is all the better for being so worn now – an eroded landscape, noded and fissured. You can’t stop looking at it and relishing it – and the way Jones films him with handheld cameras, both interacting with his new acquaintances and walking the streets at night alone, revels in that.

In Saxberger’s heyday, SoHo was bohemian. “Everyone was poor, everyone was young,” he remembers. But now the young, in those same streets, he realises, have inherited wealth, however much they pretend otherwise. He visits the leader of these earnest would-be writers, Meyers (Edmund Donovan), in his apartment to find it a minimalist palace, full of such trophy items as a $1,200 first edition of The Naked Lunch.

But the group’s muse, flamboyant actress Gloria (Greta Lee: terrific) is desperate, a chancer, given to such affectations as ordering absinthe and proclaiming she will die if she can’t read Saxberger’s poetry. In Schnitzler, the actress kills Saxberger’s infatuation by wearing a dreadful yellow jacket. Here, he’s not put off when she sports the world’s worst hat, feathers and all.

After an amazingly tarty performance of a Kurt Weill song in a piano bar, though, she brightly tells him: “You must have been beautiful when you were young”. That checks him. Despite listening to recordings of his favourite poets (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, James Schuyler), he can’t produce more than a single phrase when he tries to compose some new poetry. “Seasons collide,” he mutters to himself over and over, “seasons collide” – and gets no further.

Late Fame is modest in scale, gentle in pace. No sex, no violence. In its own terms, it’s an absolute treat, so embedded in New York, so funny and perceptive about time passing, dreams fading – seasons colliding, even.

Late Fame is in cinemas now

[Further reading: In Hounslow, they are letting a hundred flowers bloom]