Ed Saxberger is a onetime poet and a longtime postal worker, and as he tries to write a poem for the first time in decades, he can’t get past a single phrase: “seasons collide.” Those two words encapsulate the strange storm of awakening and frustration in which Ed finds himself in Late Fame, director Kent Jones’ quiet and often searingly droll feature set in Manhattan’s West Village and SoHo.

For the 60-something Ed, a coulda-been who’s unexpectedly “rediscovered,” and who’s played to conflicted perfection by Willem Dafoe, the season of his youth is crashing against his orderly life. It’s unsettling for him, but also invigorating. His downtown haunts teem anew with the ghosts of a scrappier time, when the neighborhood wasn’t filled with designer boutiques and struggling writers and painters could afford to live there. In a prolific career filled with complex and striking characters, the role of Ed Saxberger is a subdued but particularly rich one for Dafoe, himself a veteran of the downtown arts scene.

Late Fame

The Bottom Line

Understated and sharp.

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Horizons)
Cast: Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, Edmund Donovan, Jake Lacy, Clark Johnson, Tony Torn
Director: Kent Jones
Screenwriter: Samy Burch; based on the novella by Arthur Schnitzler
1 hour 37 minutes

As she did in May December, screenwriter Samy Burch explores matters of notoriety and identity, but without the meta overlay or the tabloid reverberations. She’s adapted a recently discovered unpublished 1895 novella by Arthur Schnitzler, whose stories have been the source material for dozens of film and TV productions, including Eyes Wide Shut. At once a satire of artistic pretensions and a tantalizing character study, Late Fame isn’t focused on big cathartic moments, and its third-act cataclysms are almost anticlimactic. But there’s a satisfying depth to it, and the movie abounds in exquisite grace notes — notably in Ed’s playful banter with his downstairs neighbor (Tony Torn), a priceless exchange with a bodega clerk (Michael Everett Johnson) and, more prominently, his openhearted attraction to an extravagantly flirtatious actress played by Greta Lee.

The main action begins when a young man named Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan, excellent) gushingly tells Ed that he considers him an underappreciated genius, having read his book Way Past Go, a slender collection of poetry that was published in 1979, when Ed was still in his teens. Beneath a wintry New York sky, Jones lets this jolt from the blue play out in a way that signals how grounded and gracious Ed is, his attentive gaze registering shock, confusion and delight. “Where’d you find a copy?” he manages to ask Meyers, who goes by his surname, as do the other members of the “artistic community” he says he represents.

Ed isn’t quite ready to meet this group of aspiring artists, as Meyers requests, but he accepts the open invitation to the coffeehouse where they hang out. Back in his apartment, he opens a box of long-untouched mementoes of his brief literary career, notably a rave review in the Village Voice. Jones has laid forth the “smallness” of Ed’s days: living alone, working an early shift at the post office, coming home to a midday tuna sandwich and, on some evenings, shooting pool with a few men his age at a local bar. It’s a life of routine, but the movie implicitly asks whether that necessarily means Ed is lost and needs saving.

“It used to be called something else,” he notes when he enters the coffeehouse where Meyers and his crew of fellow writers (Clay Singer, Arthur Langlie, Graham Campbell and Luca Padovan) hold court. The Enthusiasm Society, as they’ve ridiculously dubbed themselves, claim to reject technology, and they sneer with disdain at the glued-to-their-phones influencers who occupy a neighboring table.

Even as he basks in their admiration, Ed senses that they don’t necessarily understand what they claim to be trying to re-create, and he knows that he’s not the guy they want him to be. “Sum up your career touchstones,” the youngest one beseeches. The others, in their 20s, are hungry for the kind of namedropping anecdotes Ed wouldn’t share even if he had any, though he does hospitably note that he met Burroughs a few times. “So iconic!” Meyers exclaims, without irony. Then again, Meyers is in possession of a $1,200 first edition of Naked Lunch.

That these are young men raised in wealth is evident in the performances, long before Ed visits the spacious apartment Meyers’ parents bought for him. Tommaso Ortino’s astute production design is attuned to the class differences, and its greatest strength is the care and unshowy beauty it finds in Ed’s apartment: the dark warmth of the furniture, the bookshelves filled with well-worn paperbacks.

Donovan’s Meyers is fascinating in his stilted weirdness, a bit of a dandy and a bit of a dork. Like some sort of fugitive from a Whit Stillman movie — or, as Ed describes him, “pretentious, like something out of an Edith Wharton novel” — he’s sincere in his amorphous yearning for cultural importance and also a desperate poseur.

One of the old-school values the Enthusiasm fellows apparently hold dear is male chauvinism; occasional female visitors to the coffeehouse meetings go unintroduced. But Lee’s commanding yet delicate Gloria, a bit older than the boys, is no mere visitor. She’s a part of the group, romantically involved with one of them, and when she arrives she does so in a burst of exclamatory vamping. Working at the opposite end of the spectrum from her low-key performance in Past Lives, Lee channels more than a bit of Cabaret’s Sally Bowles, the sadness as well as the performative glamour.

Ed and Gloria become friends, their connection intimate but tentative as she sets the shifting boundaries and he fumbles across them. Their amble through SoHo after taking mushrooms is an especially lovely sequence, intensely in the moment and alive with the downtown ghosts that infuse the story. Jones uses audio recordings of poets reading their work to poignant effect, and the lower Manhattan that he and cinematographer Wyatt Garfield capture is lived-in, not romanticized.

The same can be said of their attention to Ed and his pool-hall buddies: That they’re working men is treated as a fact, not necessarily a virtue. When Ed, in the glow of his newfound connection to a part of himself long buried, gives a copy of his book to Arnold (Clark Johnson) as a birthday present, things don’t go particularly well. But there’s nothing sentimental about the movie or its protagonist. He left his family long ago to pursue his New York dreams, and he’s resolute in maintaining his distance. In a subplot that Burch and Jones leave daringly unresolved, at least in conventional terms, Ed withstands hectoring calls from his sister about their dying brother.

His energies belong to Meyers and Gloria and the rest of his new admirers and their plans for a reading — would-be impresario Meyers prefers to call it a “recital” — that will include a new work by the rediscovered literary prodigy. Ed also somewhat cluelessly agrees to meet with an agent, resulting in a scene of excruciating awkwardness that’s played to a delicious clash-of-cultures pitch by Dafoe and Jake Lacy (who starred in Jones’ feature debut, Diane).

As Ed lets go of new illusions, and the soundtrack reverberates with poet James Schuyler intoning “Past is past,” this beautifully underplayed drama makes it clear that Ed, whatever his shortcomings, will be all right. It’s the kids, with their trust funds and their half-baked notions of purity, that we can’t be sure of.