Critic Reviews

As directed by Kent Jones (2018’s Diane), Late Fame is an appealingly humane movie, kind to its characters’ foibles in a way that a lesser film might play for laughs.

Wryly attuned to artistic pretension yet compassionate toward those caught up in it, Late Fame needs no grand catharsis. Naturalistic, funny, and melancholy, it questions its characters’ integrity while retaining an uncommon integrity of its own.

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.

A loving and lovely sensibility runs through Late Fame, a fond and wise understanding of why some people want to become artists without making much art and why other people quit making it altogether.

In a sense, the film, directed by Kent Jones, is like a wonderful little poem. It’s also a touching nod to the past, gracefully intertwining aspects of “Metropolitan” and “Dead Poets Society.”

In “Late Fame,” a finely crafted character study starring Willem Dafoe, Ed learns that being the oldest person in the room is fun if you fall in with the right group of young people—but also that it’s tough to know if the group is right until you’re in it.

Willem Dafoe gives a master class in acting as a forgotten poet who is rediscovered by Gen Z but can’t find the mind and heart balance to truly find himself.

Instead, the film skewers and sympathizes in equal measure, mocking the pipe dreams suggested by its title and stirred by even the faintest hint of recognition, while still making clear that Ed’s literary gifts are genuinely worth the fuss.

What saves Late Fame at almost every turn is Jones’ direction, which infuses even simple dialogue scenes with breezy maturity and palpable longing.

This is a modest film but also fairly heartbreaking, a bittersweet lament for the precious parts of us we want discovered by the world, as well as for the truths we have to accept when illusions get swept away.