Late Fame was a rather wonderful and unexpected witty farce, and easily the most fun I’ve had watching Willem Dafoe be cranky in years.

Kent Jones directs this loose, modern-day take on Arthur Schnitzler’s novella. Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an aging New York civil servant whose one slim poetry collection, published decades ago and forgotten by everyone including himself, is suddenly rediscovered by a circle of young downtown literary hipsters who anoint him their lost genius and pull him into their salon. Ed is wishful enough to want the attention and cranky enough to distrust every second of it, and the film lives in that gap. A cranky, hopeful Dafoe surrounded by pretentious, idol-worshipping twenty-somethings reading manifestos at each other. What’s more to love?

Dafoe is flat-out great. It’s a wonderfully contained performance, all small shifts, letting vanity, suspicion and loneliness cross his face inside the same beat, and never once begging for our sympathy. The comedy comes from watching a man who long ago gave up on being seen get seen for all the wrong reasons, and Dafoe plays the flattery landing on Ed like a drug he knows is bad for him. Watch him rehearse casualness before walking into a room of admirers. It’s a masterclass in wanting.

Then Greta Lee shows up and the movie gets a second engine. She plays the group’s resident actress and muse, and it’s a rollercoaster of a performance, swerving from enchanting to calculating to genuinely wounded, sometimes within a single scene. She becomes the film’s sharpest instrument for its central question: is any of this admiration real, or is Ed just a prop in these kids’ performance of taste? Her scenes with Dafoe have a lovely, uneasy push-pull where you’re never quite sure who is using whom, or whether the using and the affection might be the same thing.

What the film bitterly nails is the fleeting thrill and seduction of recognition. It understands that being celebrated feels good even when you suspect it’s hollow, maybe especially then. And it has a great time poking fun at the performative nature of hiding behind intellectual facades, the readings, the manifestos, the vintage blazers, all these kids treating literature as a costume. The satire is pointed but never cruel, which is a much harder balance than it looks.

If I have a knock, it’s that the film is modest almost to a fault. It’s a small movie about small vanities, and when it brushes against a deeper sadness, the decades Ed lost to his own resignation, it doesn’t fully sit inside the wound. Still, a farce about fake admiration that ends up saying something true about the real thing. [B+]