Endless poetry: "Late Fame"

Kent Jones' Late Fame puts some seasoning on that old, old "protagonist drawn into arcane society" plot; the twist is that its protagonist is no wide-eyed naif, rather a character who might conceivably be played by 71-year-old Willem Dafoe. Dafoe's Ed Saxburger was briefly acclaimed as a vital new voice in American poetry at the back end of the 1970s - a phase the film positions as just about the last time a poet might have enjoyed any substantial cultural recognition. A fleeting dayplayer in New York's literary avant-garde - someone whose life once brushed up against Burroughs and Ginsberg - Ed now works for the U.S. Post Office, sorting mail: a steady gig far from any limelight, from which he returns to a small, book-lined flat in the outer boroughs. For some viewers, I suspect, this will seem more than enough: Jones's early scene-setting is likely to induce bookshelf envy in devotees of physical media, who will also want to rifle through every copy of the Village Voice Ed has thought to archive. Yet one night Ed comes home to find an earnest, upright young man waiting for him on an adjacent stoop. Introducing himself as Meyers (Edmund Donovan), he claims to be the spokesperson for a group of latter-day bards who've rediscovered Ed's breakthrough anthology "Way Past Go" and now invite this craggy veteran to perform alongside them at an upcoming event. As Ed starts to sit in on this fresh-faced writing group - recalling Perry Benson among the youthful suedeheads of Shane Meadows' This is England - we're left wondering whether this is a second chance, a third act or merely a dead end. His hosts, after all, are dabblers - rich kids with the trust funds and time to play at being bohemian - whereas some part of Ed is, or maybe was, the real thing.

The source is an Arthur Schnitzler novella, relocated to modern-day Bushwick by Coyote vs. ACME screenwriter Samy Burch and critic-turned-director Jones, and this multitude of inputs and influences gives Late Fame an air of unfolding across several mediums simultaneously. It could be an indie film of a 1990s stripe (given Don Fleming's twangy guitar score, it could well be the most Hal Hartleyish indie not to have been directed by Hartley himself); it could also be a layered, detailed novel set at the intersection of culture and capital. At the very least, you can see why this material spoke to Dafoe, whose Wooster Group remain just about the last troupe standing amid the remnants of New York's countercultural fringe, almost impervious to the past five decades of gentrification. This feels like Dafoe's most fully-dimensional role in a while, allowing the actor to play bashful, bemused and flattered, gentlemanly around Ed's younger actress admirer Gloria (Greta Lee); upon re-entering the poetic fray, however, he betrays flashes of his younger self's arrogance and irascibility. He's realising he cannot possibly live up to his new billing; we come to realise how exposure sometimes exposes all the reasons you never made it in the first place. The all-new Ed Saxburger appears chastened by a world that doesn't really understand him, or that he doesn't really understand: a place of electric cars and influencers, where art seems at best a sidebar. In this nostalgists' bohemia, publishers solicit memoirs rather than new work, and even fervent fans react to you as they would a museum piece: the cruellest line in the picture is Gloria telling Ed "you must have been beautiful when you were young". Between them, Burch, Jones and Dafoe secure our sympathies for Saxburger the artist and Ed the man, even if the supporting characters seem less clearly defined, possibly even unknowable. The filmmakers' strengths reside in evoking a particular milieu: there's a lot of a swaddled Dafoe pounding the cold, hard streets, which may well be the making of an artist but doesn't entirely make for a satisfying narrative. What we're getting here are scenes from the art life, a haiku in film form: in its shrugging, self-effacing way, this handsome, cultured, lived-in miniature offers a few more lines of resistance against the book-burning barbarians now amassing elsewhere.

Late Fame is now playing in selected cinemas.