Late Fame: Dafoe excels in film which reminds that art can hold beauty outside the spotlight (film review) 3 stars

Late Fame is a film about despair, longing, belonging, and the quiet fear of being forgotten. It follows the mundane life of sixty-year-old poet Ed Saxberger, played with weary restraint by Willem Dafoe. Saxberger moves through his days in a routine he seems to have unintentionally constructed for himself. He walks the same streets, eats the same meals, and works at the post office with mechanical precision. As a letter sorter, his life mirrors the mail he handles, carefully organised into small compartments. The love he once held for words has long since been misplaced, discarded somewhere in the quiet abyss of routine.

Everything shifts when Saxberger encounters the Enthusiasm Society, a group of young, privileged yet ambitious writers led by Meyer. Through them, he rediscovers a sense of purpose he had almost forgotten. Their admiration rekindles something dormant within him, the possibility that his work, and perhaps his life, still matters.

In many ways, Late Fame feels like a nod to contemporary cultural contradictions, where reverence for the printed word collides with the restless appetite of modern attention culture. Saxberger’s desperation for relevance almost seems to seep through the screen. Yet the dynamic between him and the Enthusiasm Society occasionally feels like an attempt to recreate the mentor and student bond made iconic in Dead Poets Society.

The rustic charm of the group’s meeting place is perhaps where I began to feel a reluctant appreciation for these so-called ‘struggling’ writers. However, their collective pomposity, yes even Gloria, the film’s eccentric female presence, often makes them difficult to endure. Gloria’s ambition appears to be simply becoming the most noticed person in the room, ideally as an actor. This near-insufferable quality may well be the point. The film invites us to observe the irony of aspiring to be a ‘struggling somebody’ whose ultimate goal is visibility.

One of the strongest sequences comes during Saxberger’s tense exchanges with a literary agent as he attempts to secure a book deal. The back-and-forth editing exposes the uneasy relationship between art, publicity, and the over saturation of creativity in a mass-consumption world.

Screenwriter Samy Burch threads this irony throughout the film. The desire to be fiercely individual while still yearning for community sits at the centre of the story. Dafoe excels in moments that are deliberately anticlimactic, grounding the film in quiet realism.

In a world increasingly defined by performance, Late Fame reminds us that art can still hold beauty even when it exists outside the spotlight.

Late Fame was shown at Glasgow Film Festival 2026