Drama

In Kent Jones’s lyrical and enchanting “Late Fame,” Willem Dafoe plays a forgotten New York poet who once had a moment. It was 1979, and Dafoe’s character, Ed Saxberger, was part of the downtown scene — the punks and artists and Warhol/Waters exhibitionist misfits who were living for next to nothing in the East Village and its squalid environs, hanging out and going to loft parties, but sometimes they created things. Ed published a book of poetry, entitled “Way Past Go,” that placed him on the edge of what was happening. For a while, he lived the bohemian dream. But the 1980s were around the corner, and poetry doesn’t pay the rent. So Ed, when we meet him in the present day, is no longer a poet. He’s a man who’s been working at the post office for 37 years (like Charles Bukowski did in the ’50s and ’60s), and he now lives a life of scruffy anonymity. Each night he hangs out at the same neighborhood bar with his working-class buddies who have no idea that he was ever a writer.

Early on, as he’s walking up to his crumbly Manhattan apartment building, Ed is stopped by a young man who’s watching him from across the street. The clipped, preppie fellow introduces himself as Meyers (Edmund Donovan) and explains that he read “Way Past Go,” and he thinks it’s a masterpiece. To him, Ed isn’t some ghost of a poet no one remembers; he’s a god of a writer who composed something timeless. And as Meyers explains, he’s not the only one who feels that way. He has a group of friends who regularly meet to talk about art and life and everything in between, and they’ve all read “Way Past Go,” and they all think Ed is it. They want to meet him.

Dafoe plays this encounter with a sly crestfallen radiance. Our instinct is to imagine that Ed would be flattered and touched by knowing that someone remembers (and loves) his book. But Dafoe, with haunted eyes and a slow-dawning smile, shows you that Ed can barely take it in. It’s not just that his poetry days are decades behind him; it’s that he’s not that person anymore. But beneath a certain Middle American diffidence, he’s an affable guy, and Meyers keeps cajoling him. So after a while Ed agrees to show up at that tavern to meet his latter-day Zoomer fans.

One of the common observations about filmmakers like Jean Renoir, Robert Altman, and Jonathan Demme is that they see the humanity of everyone onscreen. That’s abundantly true of Kent Jones, who made his first dramatic feature, the wrenching “Diane,” in 2018; it starred Mary Kay Place, in a revelatory performance, as an aging boomer negotiating a past that was so alive to her you could just about touch it. Watching “Late Fame,” I felt the same bittersweet sting of humanity — except that what’s special about Jones’ voice came into even higher relief for me this time. He has a style that’s very naturalistic, but in a notably avid way. His camera follows the actors around, tracking movements and thoughts, often coming right up to them. What’s driving that camera, in a word, is curiosity.

Kent Jones is a filmmaker who’s deeply and dramatically curious, and that’s a quality he shares with the film’s screenwriter, Samy Burch, who wrote “May-December.” In “Late Fame,” Jones fills the screen with people he wants to know more about. The movie, like “Diane,” has a fascinating central character, and once again we see that character set against a community that’s supportive to a degree, though not without its insidious illusions. Ed, in “Late Fame,” goes on a journey — into his past, but really into the question of whether who he was and what he was can still exist in the present.

When he first shows up to meet Meyers and his friends, they would seem to have much in common. But Ed presents himself with a no-frills courtly reticence that’s equal parts politeness and caution. He’s asking himself the same thing we are: Who are these people — this new generation of poetry lovers sitting around and drinking in the East Village? In the tavern, where they occupy the big open space upstairs (across the room from a table of “influencers” they consider their nemesis), they declare and debate their passions and their values. They’re mostly recent college graduates, from NYU and other elite havens. They love art, real art. They don’t love technology or social media. They all refer to each other by their last names, an affectation meant to evoke the toughness of the 1920s. And as a group, they call themselves the Enthusiasm Society — a dorky name, to be sure, but the dorkiness is part of it, a rebuke to the hip cynicism that walls people off from passion.

“Late Fame,” which reconfigures a posthumously published novel by Arthur Schnitzler (who wrote the 1926 novella “Dream Story,” on which “Eyes Wide Shut” was based), takes the form of a sprawling duet between Ed and his enlightened new cult of followers and fans. What’s captivating about the movie is how it uses this interface to tell a larger story: of the bohemian world then and now, and what it really meant and still means (or maybe doesn’t), and of what that reflects about where all of us are at. But this is also the quietly haunting and highly specific portrait of one man, Dafoe’s Ed: halting, eager, resilient, defeated in many ways, but still a figure of buried yearning, and just maybe someone who’s waking up a part of himself he should never have allowed to go to sleep.

What’s the Enthusiasm Society about? From the outset, the character of Meyers intrigues us. Edmund Donovan makes him formal and precise, and he talks about why he values formality (it’s all about the art of language, which the rest of the culture is letting whither away); he seems sincere enough. But then Ed pays a visit to Meyers’ apartment. As soon as he walks into the sprawling, impeccably furnished pad, we see the real story of Meyers and his friends: that they’re rich kids living on daddy’s dime — and, in a way, playing bohemian on daddy’s dime. (They say they hate technology, but Meyers is on very friendly terms with Siri.) Does this invalidate their orientation? Not necessarily. Meyers, for one, seems to genuinely care about literature. That said, the world of privilege is a different thing from the world of not just loving art but living for it. As “Late Fame” goes on, and they decide to put on a downtown poetry reading that will feature the public return of Ed Saxberger (with other bits of performance thrown in), the film meditates on whether this is a middle-class art evolution or a fatal contradiction.

Dafoe’s performance is like a slowly unfolding wildflower. His Ed starts out as a ravaged monument, but that face gradually unclenches as he grows comfortable with his new notoriety, basking in it, even as he’s aware of its built-in evanescence. Dafoe’s acting becomes most hopeful, and vulnerable, when Ed is reciprocating the interest of Gloria, the only woman in the group, and maybe the one genuine bohemian. She’s older than the rest of them are, and Greta Lee, from “Past Lives,” plays her like a postmodern vamp fatale from the ’80s, a cross between Louise Brooks and Lydia Lunch. She’s at once a professional flirt; a fabulous It Girl; an obnoxious poseur; and, as we see in the one scene where she lets the mask drop, a soulful desperate aging ingenue who will shack up with someone for the rent. But she’s also a true artist. At the poetry reading, she gets up on stage and performs Brecht/Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny” with a primal cabaret power that turns the song into a four-minute confessional autobiography. She’s mesmerizing.

And so is Ed when he finally gets up onstage to read a poem from “Way Past Go.” He’d agreed to write a new poem for the occasion, but wasn’t able to pull himself together to do it; true poetry, we gather, is not written on demand. But this way we get to hear the poet Ed was in his heyday, and there’s a disarming double vision about it: We hear how modern it sounds (and by modern I mean: How trapped in its time), from the New York references to the insistent male gaze to the jagged three-dimensionality of the language. And yet…it’s a thing of beauty! It falls on our ears like music, and we realize that Ed truly had the gift.

But is that what his new followers, like Meyers and the ersatz-proletarian Brussard (Clay Singer), covet about him? Or do they want him around because he’s a walking signifier of artistic fearlessness who they can turn into an accessory? By the end of “Late Fame,” Ed has passed through the looking glass of rediscovery only to pass back. After 37 years in the post office, he has tasted life on the other side. But what he wants is what’s real, and that’s something bohemia may no longer have room for.