Ed Saxberger is an amiable, unassuming New Yorker on the cusp of old age who works at the post office and wears a pen behind one ear. In his youth, he published an anthology of poetry called Way Past Go, which caused barely a ripple and quickly slipped out of print. Then one day he is accosted outside his apartment by an NYU student, who explains that he stumbled across Way Past Go at a secondhand bookstore and was transported, blown away and could scarcely believe what he’d found. “You’re a man of letters,” the student tells Saxberger, which is undeniably true given that he spends his days sorting them.
Hitchcock once said that nine-tenths of a film’s success is in the casting, by which measure Late Fame already qualifies as a hit. Saxberger is portrayed with a loose, warm-leather ease by Willem Dafoe, who makes the man look bemused but never once makes him foolish. It’s a performance so natural it barely looks like acting at all and it keeps the film honest when the plot shows its hand and the gears start to creak. When the postal worker is introduced to his band of new disciples, the students crowd around as if inspecting a piece of living history. “Of course that’s how you’d look,” purrs Gloria (Greta Lee), the group’s flamboyant queen bee. Gloria speaks for her friends but she speaks for the rest of us, too.
Saxberger’s principal champion is Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), a breathless wannabe writer, half-constricted by his tight white turtleneck and awkwardly living off his father’s money. Meyers runs a salon of sorts, the Enthusiasm Society, and cajoles his idol into writing a piece to be performed at the group’s first public show. Saxberger hasn’t written in decades, doesn’t even see himself as a writer, but he is flattered by the attention and faintly dazzled by Gloria, who is a club singer by night and a resting actor by day. Typically the man spends his evenings at the local billiard bar, where the jukebox plays Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby as though it only came out last week. Now he’s running with a new crowd, toiling to write a fresh poem and casually neglecting his old blue-collar pals.
Late Fame is adapted from a 19th-century novella by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, although the tale is comfortably at home in modern-day Manhattan. Director Kent Jones is a former critic and a longtime director of the New York film festival, steeped in the specifics of the city’s arts scene. Jones wears his learning lightly but his film is at its most assured when it is navigating the vexed interplay between old and new Gotham, showing how the mystique of the past percolates through to the present. The members of the Enthusiasm Society style themselves as dandified retro beatniks, come to venerate, curate and cannibalise their ancestors. “Were you friends with Ginsberg?” they demand of Saxberger, and he sheepishly admits he was not. “Just tell them yes,” Gloria advises, sotto voce. She knows cultural cachet when she sees it and hates the thought of it being wasted.
Once Saxberger has fallen in with his new gang of friends, Late Fame relaxes into its story just a little too much. The tale’s denouement is telegraphed, the moral lesson feels rote and the tension is largely dependent on Saxberger’s increasing pangs of self-doubt. All the same, this one has stayed with me. It’s a lovely slice of life, a heartfelt New York story – and judging from the brief burst of writing that we are permitted to hear, the postman can rest easy whether he is on stage or at work. Saxberger’s poetry is ecstatic and gritty in the style of Frank O’Hara, conjuring the sounds and flavours of the old New York, and the authentically voracious hunger of youth. The Enthusiasm Society is a joke; its members’ approach to art is all wrong. But they are right about Saxberger, which means there may be some hope for them yet.
• Late Fame screened at the Venice film festival.
