Willem Dafoe is discreet and magnificent

Ed Saxberger is a poet and postal worker for a long time, and while trying to write a poem for the first time in decades, he cannot overcome a single phrase: “The seasons collide.” Those two words encapsulate the strange storm of the awakening and the frustration in which ED is in Late fameThe quiet functions already often from Droll’s director Kent Jones are found in the West Village in Manhattan and Soho.

For the 60-year-old edition, a power-been that is unexpectedly “rediscovered”, and who has played with conflicting perfection for Willem Dafoe, the season of his youth crashes against his orderly life. It is disturbing for him, but also stimulating. His center pursues again with the ghosts of a more unpleasant moment, when the neighborhood was not full of boutiques of designers and writers and painters with difficulties could afford to live there. In a prolific career full of complex and surprising characters, the role of Ed Saxberger is subjected but particularly rich for Dafoe, himself a veteran of the artistic scene of the center.

As she did in May of DecemberThe screenwriter Samy Burch explores matters of notoriety and identity, but without the overlap target or the reverberations of the tabloids. She has adapted an unpublished 1895 novel recently discovered by Arthur Schnitzler, whose stories have been the source material for dozens of film and television productions, included Very partial eyes. At the same time a satire of artistic pretensions and a tempting character study, Late fame It does not focus on the great cathartic moments, and its third -year cataclysms are almost anti -antimatic. But there is a satisfactory depth, and the film abounds in exquisite grace notes, particularly in ED’s playful jokes with their neighbor below (Tony Torn), an invaluable exchange with a warehouse employee (Michael Everett Johnson) and, more prominently, his attraction open to an extravagantly coqueteros accessories played by Greta Lee.

The main action begins when a young man named Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan, excellent) tells Ed from Gubia that he considers him a underestimated genius, after reading his book Very pastA thin collection of poetry that was published in 1979, when Ed was still in his adolescence. Under a New York winter sky, Jones let this blue shake develop in a way that indicates how deep and kind is Ed, his attentive look registering shock, confusion and delight. “Where did you find a copy?” He manages to ask Meyers, who goes through his last name, as well as the other members of the “artistic community,” he says he represents.

ED is not ready to meet this group of aspiring artists, as Meyers requests, but accepts the open invitation to the cafeteria where they pass the time. Back in his apartment, he opens a souvenir box of his brief literary career, especially a favorite review in the Voice of the people. Jones has established the “smallness” of the days of ED: Living alone, working in an early shift in the Post Office, returning home to a noon tuna sandwich and, in some nights, shooting the pools with a few men of their age in a local bar. It is a routine life, but the film implicitly asks if that necessarily means that Ed is lost and needs to save.

“It used to be called something else,” he says when he enters the cafeteria where Meyers and his crew of other writers (clay singer, Arthur Langlie, Graham Campbell and Luca Padovan) have a court. The society of enthusiasm, as they have been ridiculously called, claim to reject technology, and make fun of disdain for the influencers of the phones glued to their phones that occupy a neighboring table.

Even while it is based on their admiration, Ed feels that they do not necessarily understand what they say they are trying to recreate, and knows that he is not the guy they want it to be. “Summarize the touch stones of your career,” begs the youngest. The others, in their 20 years, are hungry for the type of anecdotes of names that Ed would not share, even if he had none, although he takes into account that he met Burroughs several times. “So iconic!” Meyers exclaims, without irony. On the other hand, Meyers is in possession of a first edition of $ 1,200 of Naked lunch.

That these are young men raised in wealth is evident in the actions, long before ED visits the spacious apartment that Meyers’s parents bought. The cunning design of the cunning of Tommaso Ortino is in tune with class differences, and its greatest strength is the unwavering care and beauty that it finds in the ED apartment: the dark heat of the furniture, the shelves full of exhausted pocket bags.

Donovan Meyers is fascinating in its rigid rarity, a bit elegant and a little idiot. As a kind of fugitive from a Whit Stillman movie, or, as Ed describes, “pretentious, as something out of an Edith Wharton novel,” he is sincere in his amorphous yearning of cultural importance and also a desperate poster.

One of the values ​​of the old school that the classmates of enthusiasm apparently have dear is male chauvinism; Occasional visitors to cafeteria meetings are not included. But Lee’s domain, but delicate glory, a little older than children, is not a mere visitor. She is part of the group, romantically involved with one of them, and when she arrives she does it in an explosion of exclamatory vampires. Working at the opposite end of the spectrum from his discreet performance in Past livesLee channels more than a little CabaretSally Bowles, sadness and performative glamor.

Ed and Gloria become friends, their intimate but attempt while it establishes the changing limits and he falls on them. His wandering through Soho after taking fungi is a specially charming sequence, intensely at the moment and living with the ghosts of the center that instill the story. Jones use audio recordings of poets who read their work to the moving effect, and the bass Manhattan that he and photography director Wyatt Garfield Capture are lived, not romantized.

The same can be said of their attention to Ed and his friends in the pools room: that they are workers who are treated as a fact, not necessarily as a virtue. When Ed, in the brightness of his new connection with a part of himself buried for a long time, gives a copy of his book to Arnold (Clark Johnson) as a birthday gift, things are not particularly good. But there is nothing sentimental in the movie or its protagonist. He left his family a long time ago to pursue his dreams from New York, and is determined to maintain his distance. In a secondary plot that Burch and Jones leave daringly unsolved, at least in conventional terms, he resists his sister’s calls about his dying brother.

His energies belong to Meyers and Gloria and the rest of his new fans and his plans for a reading, the possible businessman Meyers prefers to call him a “recital”, which will include a new work of the rediscovered literary prodigy. Ed also in a little endlessly according to an agent, resulting in an unbearable discomfort scene that is interpreted to a delicious launch of Dafoe and Lacy crops (which starred in the debut of Jones, Jones, Diane).

While Ed leaves new illusions, and the soundtrack Reverbera with the poet James Schuyler, “past the past is past”, this beautifully minimized drama makes it clear that Ed, whatever their deficiencies, will be fine. They are children, with their trust funds and their notions of purity halfway, of which we cannot be sure.