Magnolia Pictures released the first trailer for Late Fame this week, and the reaction landed on one thing fast: Willem Dafoe. The film opens in New York on August 7 and Los Angeles on August 14 before expanding, and the early word already places Dafoe's performance in the conversation for the 2026 awards season.
He plays Ed Saxberger, a poet who made a small mark in New York decades ago and then spent the years since working quietly at a post office, his book long forgotten. His life tips over when a group of twentysomething artists who call themselves the Enthusiasm Society decide he is a lost genius worth rediscovering, partly to lift their own ambitions of running a literary salon. Drawn in by the attention, and by the magnetic actress-singer Gloria, played by Greta Lee, Saxberger starts to question how real any of this new adoration is.
The pedigree behind the camera is the reason to pay attention. Late Fame is the second narrative feature from Kent Jones, the former critic and longtime Scorsese associate who made the quiet drama Diane in 2018. The script is by Samy Burch, the Oscar-nominated writer of May December, adapting a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, the Austrian author whose work also gave Kubrick the source material for Eyes Wide Shut. Jones moves Schnitzler's story from old Vienna to present-day lower Manhattan. The film premiered at Venice last year and has been quietly touring festivals since.
Why it matters.
A small film about a forgotten poet is not built to trend, and that is the point. No franchise, no spectacle, just one of the most reliable actors alive disappearing into a man reckoning with recognition that arrives too late to mean what it should. Reviews out of the festivals have been split, with some critics finding the film too restrained for its own good, but nearly all of them agree on Dafoe.
It is also a film about something worth sitting with: what late recognition does to a person, and whether the people handing it to you actually mean it. Those are the quiet questions a loud release weekend never asks. Late Fame is the kind of film worth marking on the calendar before the summer noise drowns it out.
Late Fame opens in US theaters on August 7 through Magnolia Pictures.
About this film
