“Tony,” “Late Fame,” and the Rocky Road to Literary Stardom

Bourdain was in his forties when “Kitchen Confidential” was published, and “Tony” ends with that career-igniting milestone still decades away. “Late Fame,” an exquisitely wry and melancholic new drama from the director Kent Jones, approaches the puzzle of a writer’s life and art from the opposite direction. Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a rumpled-looking Manhattanite in his late sixties or early seventies, was a young man when he wrote a slender volume of poetry titled “Way Past Go”; it was published, in 1979, to some acclaim, including a rave in the Village Voice. Nearly fifty years later, Saxberger’s early burst of literary promise is long forgotten, as are the poems themselves. He works at a post office, a job he’s held for thirty-seven years. Age and alcohol have taken a toll; he’s several years sober but still hangs out at a bar with his buddies, none of whom know about his literary past.

One chilly day, that past comes rushing back. Saxberger is greeted outside his apartment building by Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), an impassioned young admirer who considers “Way Past Go” a masterpiece: “It’s as if the poems were written yesterday,” he declares. Dafoe, a master of expressive restraint, turns even this first encounter into a small triumph of barely suppressed feeling. A crinkly smile steals across Saxberger’s careworn face, but it’s chased away by genuine shock (“Is this some kind of joke?” he wonders aloud) and more than a hint of skepticism. He’s right to be suspicious. Meyers, an almost parodic vision of an old soul, gushes praise in unfashionably complete sentences. He begs Saxberger to meet with him and his friends—a motley group of writers, artists, critics, and intellectuals, all apparently just as besotted with “Way Past Go” as he is. But Donovan shows us the calculation, verging on disingenuousness, beneath Meyers’s lofty, earnest veneer. Here is a man who believes fervently in his own flattery but also wields it like a weapon.

After some initial reluctance, Saxberger finds himself in a Greenwich Village coffee shop where Meyers and his group regularly hang out. They call themselves the Enthusiasm Society, a name that captures their unironic spirit of cultural advocacy and their instinctive rejection of snark. They extend that enthusiasm to Saxberger immediately, welcoming him into the group and, before long, inviting him to serve as the marquee name for an upcoming event devoted to readings of their work. But, after the initial intoxication of niche celebrity, Saxberger finds himself disadvantaged and disoriented on multiple fronts. He is no longer the vigorous young poet who took inspiration from, and briefly rubbed elbows with, the New American Poetry pioneers of the nineteen-forties and fifties: Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, Ed Dorn. Decades out of practice, Saxberger is assailed by writer’s block and confused by the machinations of a modern-day publishing industry that wants to turn his rediscovery into a branding exercise. He also finds himself at odds with his bar buddies, who, in one lacerating scene, respond to Saxberger’s self-disclosure with mocking, philistine incuriosity.

“Late Fame” has its roots in an 1895 novella, by the Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler, that was, itself, the object of overdue discovery: unpublished during the author’s lifetime, it didn’t appear until 2014. (An English translation came out in 2017.) It was adapted for the screen by Samy Burch, who previously wrote “May December” (2023), Todd Haynes’s slippery comic melodrama about the cinematic exploitation of an old tabloid scandal. The circumstances of “Late Fame” may be less outwardly fraught, but here, as in the earlier film, Burch fleshes out the awkward dynamics of an ill-advised collaboration, in which superficial pleasantries hide the petty motives and desires of all involved. And, despite a shift from nineteenth-century Vienna to present-day New York, she has left the bones of the original story largely intact. This portrait of wannabe bohemians and intellectuals who adopt the fashions, mannerisms, and artistic practices of an earlier time has its own essential timelessness.