24/08/2026
Willem Dafoe stars in Late Fame, opening tonight and playing until Saturday.
"It’s not easy to make a living as a poet. And even if you do, those earnings are unlikely to carry a man into late middle age in much comfort.
Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), the main character in Kent Jones’ Late Fame, is a guy who wrote a poetry collection decades earlier but had long since left that life behind in favor of a workaday life as a mailroom clerk, with friends who know nothing about his past literary life.
Late Fame is about what happens when Saxberger’s work gets discovered by a group of young literary posers who call themselves The Enthusiasm Society. They’re a very Whit Stillman-esque crew of privileged kids with literary aspirations of their own, and encourage him to rediscover his, and pick up the pen again.
Ed is briefly invigorated by their appreciation for his work, and ends up especially smitten with the female of the group (Greta Lee), a sometime actress who is what used to be called a “drama queen.”
Late Fame is a fun, rich New York story, and if you thought from that plot description that its story represents a straight line of this forgotten man finding a way back to fame, well, that’s not quite how it works out." - Stephen Silver
