Sixtysomething Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) seems like a regular, blue-collar New Yorker. Living alone, he has worked at the postal sorting office for 37 years, and frequents a local bar in the evenings, where he plays pool with his buddies. Yet, when he first came to the city as a teenager in the late '70s, he was part of the flourishing downtown artistic scene, publishing a collection of poetry titled Way Past Go.

Out of the blue an earnest young man Myers (Edmund Donovan) calls at his apartment, rhapsodising about Saxberger’s long-out-of-print poems. He would like to introduce the former poet to his fellow aesthetes in the Enthusiasm society, whose members address each other by their surnames, and who share a collective disdain for the vulgarity and negativity of contemporary culture and what they call "sociopathic media".

Directed by ex-critic turned filmmaker Kent Jones (Hitchcock/Truffaut, Diane) and scripted by Samy Burch (May December), this observant character study is adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s posthumously published 1895 novella Late Fame, which involved a civil servant in Austro-Hungarian Vienna being acclaimed for his past poetry by a group of upcoming writers. Jones and Burch have fashioned this source material into a quintessentially New York film, which unfolds exclusively within the Greenwich Village and SoHo neighbourhoods. Saxberger travels everywhere by foot, with the handheld camera sticking close to him on his journeys through the wintry city.

The opening sequence, which includes archival black and white footage of counter-cultural poetry readings accompanied on the soundtrack by Mars’s abrasive ‘Helen Forsdale’, sketches the bohemian world Saxberger once inhabited. The haunts of his youth however have been replaced by luxury apartments and designer-label shops, and the possibility of living cheaply in the city and devoting oneself to artistic endeavours has disappeared. It is telling that the members of Enthusiasm have parents who can afford to buy their offspring spacious flats in desirable New York locations.

The only female member of the Enthusiasm collective is the flamboyant cabaret artist and actress Gloria (an impressive Grace Lee), who is idolised by her male colleagues, who are significantly younger than her. Maintaining a theatrical diva persona, which partly channels Lisa Minnelli’s Sally Bowles in Cabaret, she is clearly the most talented individual within the group, as Saxberger witnesses when he watches her perform a powerful rendition of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s tragic ballad Surabaya Johnny to a handful of drinkers in a bar.

Everyone has their reasons in Late Fame, and Jones and Burch treat their characters with compassion. It is amusing to hear the pretentious language deployed by Myers and his collaborators and to observe their bizarre fashion choices, yet the film doesn’t dismiss their nostalgia for an earlier artistic era out of hand. And in one of the most moving scenes Saxberger calls unannounced on Grace at her apartment, and we can deduce some of the painful sacrifices she has been forced to make to survive as a performer in the city.

Dafoe, who himself began his career in New York in an experimental theatre troupe, is outstanding in the lead role. Playing a modest and emotionally reticent individual, he demonstrates his ability to convey emotions through subtle facial expressions. Myers and Grace in their different ways have woken something up within Saxberger, stirring feelings that have long been buried. Can he reconcile his past and present existences? Is he now being seduced by the idea of being ‘rediscovered’? To its credit Late Fame ends ambiguously, allowing us to ponder what will happened to both Saxberger and the individuals within Enthusiasm.

Late Fame is released in UK cinemas on Friday 4 September.

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