By David Stewart

Director Kent Jones explores aging, ego, and New York’s literary ghosts in a wry, performance-driven drama led by Willem Dafoe.

Late Fame, directed by Kent Jones

Does creativity remain fertile as one reaches the end of their life? From In a Lonely Place (1950) to The Wonder Boys (2000), a number of films have probed the internal insecurities of the world-weary, burnt-out writer. Directed by respected film critic, former NYFF programmer, and documentarian Kent Jones, Late Fame is a cerebrally warm but satirically stark exploration of the theme, focusing on how the influence of celebrity can upend creativity. Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s posthumously titular novella, screenwriter Samy Burch (May December) deliberately discards the dour setting of Schnitzler’s 1920s Vienna for the livelier atmosphere of New York City’s modern-day Lower East Side.

Willem Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, a postal worker and once-published poet who hasn’t written anything in nearly four decades. His daily grind is comfortably monotonous until Meyers (Edmund Donovan), a young overenthusiastic fan of his, shows up outside his apartment. After persistent wheedling, Meyers introduces Ed to a café salon of various writers who dream of their big break. In reality, the group is made up of pretentious rich boys who haven’t the slightest idea what artists of Ed’s generation went through to be published. Meyers and his wealthy cohorts sit on the far end of the café, away from the social media influencers, as they profess hypocritical Luddite-based principles while taking calls on their cell phones. But these coffee sessions fuel Ed’s once-depleted ego and rekindle his affection for Gloria (Greta Lee), an actress and chanteuse struggling to make her mark. Ed finds himself cajoled by Meyers into writing new material and a memoir as part of a campaign to revive his career by making him the keynote speaker at a public reading. Panic sets in: Ed’s days are spent looking at a blank page as he listens to audiotapes of the poets of his generation, such as Anne Waldman and William Carlos Williams, attempting to foil his writer’s block.

Late Fame is Jones’ reverential (and earnest) love letter to creativity and New York City. The director grew up in the Berkshires before moving to NYC in the ’80s to work on Martin Scorsese’s documentaries. His lens affectionately embraces the eccentric characters in Burch’s script, the remnants of the city’s bygone literary era. His quasi-verité approach to filming the salons hums with a verve reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) as well as John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and Opening Night (1977). As in Jones’ first narrative feature, Diane (2018), the director finds a transcendent resonance in Ed’s life of self-induced loneliness. He hides his cell phone — only to end up hearing voicemails from his estranged family as he toils in the service of adoring strangers. Meanwhile, Ed has to deal with his social life, his blue-collar postal worker buddies putting down his literary dreams in a dive bar worthy of a visit from Charles Bukowski.

Dafoe is a consistently engaging actor. His composed presence here is not unlike Jack Nicholson’s David Staebler in Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). He is reluctant to go along with the insane plans of those around him; we know this because we hear him reflect on his plight during nightly walks around the city. Dafoe started his career in the late ’70s as a member of the experimental theatre company the Wooster Group, and his reenactment of Ed’s spirited youthful performances evokes an edgy energy. Greta Lee taps into Sally Bowles–styled stamina; she lights up Ed’s life, serenading him as she sings Kurt Weill numbers in a downtown cabaret. (The film that inspired Jones to become a critic and director was Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972).) Edmund Donovan’s hyperactive performance as Meyers lampoons those who are oblivious to the barriers posed by class and unable to separate the rewards of creativity from those of instant gratification. Late Fame has its creative limitations: Ed’s past as an alcoholic and Gloria’s psychological conflicts are underexplored. Still, the depth of Dafoe and Lee’s performances makes up for these weaknesses; the pair help amplify the suspense that holds the film’s third act together.

The film’s visuals are a tactile plus. The handheld camerawork of Wyatt Garfield, who shot Jones’ previous film along with Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), underscores the morbidity of Ed’s isolation and the reverie of his newfound friends. Editor Mike Selemon has cut the snappy wit and pathos in Burch’s script with a sharp eye. Don Fleming’s bluesy guitar score evokes the sounds of John Lurie and other No Wave musicians who were a big part of the downtown New York scene of the late ’70s, when Ed established his career.

In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote that “to reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.” Jones, no doubt drawing on his critical sensibility, successfully conveys the complexities of making art, regardless of age, and shares them beautifully in Late Fame.

David Stewart currently teaches at Emerson College, Plymouth State University, and Southern New Hampshire University. His first book, 2025’s There’s No Going Back: The Life and Work of Jonathan Demme, was published by the University of Kentucky Press.

Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson and KeiLyn Durrel Jones as Bill Bray in Michael. Photo Credit: Glen Wilson/Lionsgate

By Jake Coyle

associated press

“Michael” slides a sequin glove over the pop staar’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great.

Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted.

“Michael” doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts. It moonwalks right past them. The result is a kind of fantasy film, one that relives the extraordinary highs of Michael Jackson while turning a blind eye to the lows.

There’s something understandably hard to resist about that. Who wouldn’t love to forget all the bad that comes with Michael Jackson? “Billie Jean,” alone, is good enough to give you amnesia. We’re talking about one of the greatest song-and-dance entertainers of the 20th century. The connection he forged with millions shouldn’t be taken for granted. And it can feel downright giddy to once again bask in Jackson’s former glory — or, at least, an uncanny approximation of it by Jaafar Jackson, his nephew. But that also makes “Michael” as much a fairy tale as Peter Pan’s Neverland.

“Michael” originally included scenes dealing with the sexual abuse allegations, but those were cut due to stipulations in an earlier settlement. The finished film, scripted by John Logan (“Gladiator,” “Aviator”), is largely structured as a father-son drama. In the film’s early Gary, Indiana-set scenes, Joe Jackson (a typically compelling Colman Domingo) forcefully drills his children into becoming the Jackson 5 and whips young Michael (an excellent Juliano Krue Valdi) with his belt.

While “Michael” spans the Jackson 5 and “Off the Wall” and “Thriller,” its through line is Michael’s struggle for emancipation from his overbearing father and manager. In that way, it’s quite similar to 2022’s “Elvis,” which likewise turned on the dynamic between Presley and the controlling Colonel Tom Parker.

Similarly, the broad-strokes, play-the-hits biopic approach is very much at work in “Michael,” produced by Graham King (“Bohemian Rhapsody”). Fuqua, best known for muscular thrillers like “Training Day” and “The Equalizer,” is maybe an unlikely pick for the task. But he cleverly stages some scenes, like when young Michael first lays down a track in a recording studio. While his father looms outside and producers tell Michael not to shuffle his feet so much, Fuqua moves inside the booth. We hear nothing but Michael’s voice. The noise stops and there’s just his pure, not-yet-corrupted vocal power, singing “Who’s Lovin’ You.”

What happened to Jackson as he became an adult, many would consider both an astonishing success story and an American tragedy. “Michael” doesn’t try for that balance. It mainly follows the emergence of an icon, albeit a peculiar one who takes shelter in a room full of children’s toys and whose need to be “perfect” drives him to cosmetic surgery in his early 20s. These and other developments (like the arrival of Bubbles the chimp) are mostly met with eye rolls by family members: the idiosyncrasies of a man-child genius.

At nearly every turn, you can feel the narrative being twisted, sometimes by those still alive. (Joe Jackson died in 2018, nine years after his son’s death at 50.) Katherine Jackson (Nia Long), Michael’s mother, is downright saintly. John Branca (Miles Teller), co-executor of Jackson’s estate and a producer of the film, is seen as a heroic ally to Michael.

Branca, perhaps, deserves the victory lap. Such a big-screen revival for Jackson was once unthinkable. But “Michael” is the latest in a string of successes for the former King of Pop, including Cirque du Soleil shows and “MJ the Musical” on Broadway — all despite the evidence presented by the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland.” “Michael” isn’t really a rebuttal to that film. It’s pure pop shock-and-awe. And turning up the volume on “Beat It” will win you some arguments.

What’s on screen is constantly running, in our minds, alongside what isn’t. Even the glossiest of biopics allow some negative characteristics to show, but Fuqua’s film sticks almost entirely to Michael, the myth. He visits kids in hospitals, makes Black history on MTV, writes the “Thriller” album in near solitude. (Kendrick Sampson plays a seldom-seen Quincy Jones.)

As played by Jaafar Jackson, Michael is a wide-eyed innocent who bore the scars of abuse and yet nevertheless maintained a childlike belief in music: king and casualty of pop, at once. If there’s one thing that needs no embellishment here, it’s the fervor of audiences for Jackson at his astonishing peak. Fuqua lingers on the fans losing their minds for Michael, but that ardor was real. Jaafar Jackson’s performance is a remarkable, charming facsimile not just for the dance moves and singing voice but, more crucially, for channeling Jackson’s sweetness.

“Michael” concludes on an oddly and — considering where things would ultimately go for Jackson — completely false note of triumph. But when the movie sticks to the music, as it often does in copious concert performances, it’s hard not to be moved. There is an undeniable thrill in being transported back to a more innocent America awakening to the power of pop spectacle, when arenas sang in unison to “Man in the Mirror” and “Human Nature.” The nostalgia of “Michael” is for more than Michael Jackson. But blindly believing only in that celebrity, in that fantasy, is repeating a sad history all over again.

“Michael,” a Lionsgate release in theaters Thursday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for some thematic material, language, and smoking. Running time: 127 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

Twenty years have gone by; the fashion and publishing worlds have changed but Satan’s clothing and accessory choices are pretty much what they were. It’s time for a sprightly and amiable sequel to the adored mid-00s Manhattan romcom that followed the adventures of would-be serious writer and saucer-eyed ingenue Andrea “Andy” Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway. Straight out of college in one of the flyover states, she fluked a job at iconic New York fashion magazine Runway, edited by the terrifying and amusingly surnamed Miranda Priestly, played of course by Meryl Streep. Miranda doesn’t look a day older in the sequel, and nor does Nigel, played by Stanley Tucci, still in post as her loyal, worldly, privately melancholy second-in-command.

This follow-up is fun, though let down by Andy’s bafflingly dreary and chemistry-free romance with a dull Australian real estate magnate (a tepid role for Patrick Brammall from TV’s Colin from Accounts). Miranda’s latest submissive prince-consort boyfriend is played by Kenneth Branagh, bizarrely the lead violinist in a string quartet. The film also gives us a lot of star-fan cameos – this is usually a bad sign, but managed well enough here. Not the big cameo though, not the one they were surely chasing, the white whale of cameos: Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor on whom Priestly is modelled.

So Andy has come back, having been laid off by some Jeff Bezos-type meanie from the upmarket broadsheet where she’d been winning awards for super-serious but boring articles. She can’t afford to turn down a mephistophelean offer to be features editor for Runway, where she finds things are very different. The magazine now has nothing like the colossal budgets of old; embarrassingly, it has to distance itself from the sweatshop economy, and is ground down by chasing clicks and eyeballs in a fickle digital world ruled by a teen customer base with no class and no taste. Miranda has to pay pursed lip-service to body positivity and rejecting heteronormativity in the workplace, and gets schooled in correct language by her new assistant Amari (Simone Ashley). She even has to fly coach.

In fact, the hauteur prerogative has passed on to Andy’s old nemesis, the ice queen of aspirational couture and Miranda’s former top assistant Emily, who is now the head of Dior, calling the shots and making the shrewd point that ultra-luxury brands for the 0.1% are recession-proof. She is played once again with style and plenty of nice lines by Emily Blunt.

It is a pleasure to see (most of) the old gang back, including screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and director David Frankel. (I groan at the grumpy and obtuse response I had to the first film, before watching it again on TV and epiphanically realising how great it is.) It’s very funny when Miranda hasn’t the smallest memory of who Andy is. Or has she? Justin Theroux is amusing as Emily’s grinningly daft-yet-sinister plutocrat boyfriend Benji.

The movie takes us through new versions of the beats from the first film: Andy dishing with Nigel in the cafeteria; Nigel picking out something for the ungrateful Andy to wear, this time for a trip to Miranda’s place in the Hamptons; Andy going to a fashion mecca (Milan); Andy frantically engaging in backstairs shenanigans to protect Miranda from some wicked corporate coup. And for the DWP connoisseurs, there’s even an outing for Andy’s awful blue polyblend sweater that Nigel found to be such a windup back in the day. This is good-natured, buoyant entertainment. It’s wearing well.