Blu-ray Review: Late Fame

Blu-ray, DVD & On Demand Release Date: Oct. 6, 2026
Director: Kent Jones
Cast: Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, Edmund Donavan, Jake Lacy
Price: Blu-ray $17.99, DVD $26.98
Studio: Magnolia

RATINGS (out of 5 dishes):

There are worse things than being rediscovered. There are also, as Late Fame rather slyly suggests, worse things than being forgotten.

Kent Jones’s (Hitchcock/Truffaut) smart, gently satirical film stars Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse) as Ed Saxberger, a longtime postal worker who, decades earlier, published a slim volume of poetry, enjoyed a brief flirtation with literary recognition, and then quietly got on with his life. These days he shoots pool with neighborhood regulars who have no idea their drinking buddy was once a poet—and Ed seems perfectly content to leave it that way.

Until, naturally, the young people arrive.

A circle of downtown would-be artists calling themselves the Enthusiasm Society discovers Ed’s book and embraces him as a lost master. Suddenly he is being celebrated by people young enough to be his children, invited to literary gatherings and encouraged to wonder whether the world made a terrible mistake by overlooking him.

Screenwriter Samy Burch and director Jones have ingeniously transplanted Arthur Schnitzler’s rediscovered 1895 novella from fin-de-siècle Vienna to contemporary New York. (Schnitzler also wrote Dream Story, later transformed by Stanley Kubrick into 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut.) Their downtown Manhattan has the pleasantly artificial quality of an indie movie from another era: bars, cramped apartments, literary pretensions and young people determined to become Artists with a capital A.

The film is affectionate toward these aspiring bohemians but not fooled by them. They possess plenty of enthusiasm, as advertised; whether they have the discipline, stamina or talent required to survive the less glamorous decades of an artistic life is another question.

Greta Lee (TV’s The Morning Show) is especially delicious as Gloria, the group’s lone woman and resident theatrical—a mercurial aspiring actress who has seemingly constructed herself from stray memories of flappers, noir heroines and old-Hollywood divas. Her flirtation with Ed gives the film its most seductive charge.

And Dafoe is just right: funny, rueful and wonderfully unshowy, playing Ed not as a failed poet but as a man who had long ago stopped requiring the world to decide whether he was one. Late Fame has great fun watching that comfortable certainty get rattled. After all, obscurity is one thing when you’ve made peace with it. It becomes something else entirely when a roomful of self-styled young bohemians suddenly informs you that the world was wrong about you all along.