Kent Jones’s carefully wrought film Late Fame offers a wry eulogy for vanished bohemia and a deft meditation on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum that “there are no second acts in American lives”.

Almost half a century ago, Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) was a minor figure on the New York poetry scene. But as Ed himself acknowledges: “I had my moment. It passed.”

The decades since the publication of his solitary volume of verse, Way Past Go, have passed in utter obscurity. So returning home one wintry evening, Ed is surprised to be met by Myers (Edmund Donovan, enjoyably vampiric), a twentysomething stranger who hails him as a forgotten literary genius and an avatar of “Old Downtown” New York.

Myers introduces himself as the leader of a small group of nostalgic aesthetes who have rediscovered and taken inspiration from Ed’s slender, long out-of-print volume of Beat-ish verses. Sceptical yet flattered, Ed lets Myers prevail upon him to meet his band of self-styled analogue contrarians (snottily deprecating the digital influencers huddled over their smartphones at the next table).

His new pals press Ed to compose a new poem – his first in decades – as the star turn in an absurd faux-New Wave “happening” whose planning gives the film its light narrative framework. With his library of taped poets – T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Gary Snyder – for company, Ed........

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