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 \u201cOld Downtown\u201d New York.<\/p>\n
Myers introduces himself as the leader of a small group of nostalgic aesthetes who have rediscovered and taken inspiration from Ed\u2019s 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). <\/p>\n
His new pals press Ed to compose a new poem \u2013 his first in decades \u2013 as the star turn in an absurd faux-New Wave \u201chappening\u201d whose planning gives the film its light narrative framework. With his library of taped poets \u2013 T.S. Eliot<\/a>, Wallace Stevens<\/a>, Gary Snyder<\/a> \u2013 for company, Ed doggedly pursues inspiration through the chilly Manhattan streets (atmospherically filmed by Wyatt Garfield).<\/p>\n Passing the designer boutiques and high-end restaurants of 21st-century SoHo, he seems a man out of time \u2013 a distant cousin perhaps of the night crawler Dafoe played in Paul Schrader\u2019s Light Sleeper<\/a> (1992). Even his booklined one-bedroom Lower East Side walkup feels like a holdover from a bygone era of affordable rents in cold-water apartments. <\/p>\n But that Patti Smith<\/a> past is a distant country, and so it seems is Ed\u2019s creative spark. The suggestive phrase \u201cseasons collide\u201d offers the germ of an idea, but his yellow legal pad remains obstinately blank. Come the big night, Ed can only offer to read a 45-year-old poem from Way Past Go \u2013 though as he points out to the disappointed Myers, as far as the audience is concerned it could just as well be brand new. <\/p>\n Ed is in every scene of the film, so inevitably much depends on Willem Dafoe\u2019s performance \u2013 which happily is ideally cast and perfectly judged. Initially it feels a stretch that Dafoe\u2019s edgy, charismatic screen persona could be submerged in the unremarkable routines of Ed\u2019s life \u2013 his daily grind as a postal worker, toasted tuna sandwiches, rounds of pool at the local bar with his small coterie of blue-collar male friends.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s precisely by playing off these expectations \u2013 and perhaps our awareness of his own long career as a fixture on the real downtown scene (a founder member of the avant garde Wooster Group<\/a> theatre company) \u2013 that Dafoe comes to embody Ed\u2019s distant boho past, his workaday present, and his unsuspected hunger for something more, all so credibly. <\/p>\n Another actor might also have had us worrying for Ed\u2019s wellbeing or that this vulnerable older man might be exploited, knowingly or otherwise, by his callow new pals. But Dafoe\u2019s feral mien, however subdued here, reassures us he\u2019s no patsy. Ed sees as clearly as we do that these self-styled artistes are quintessential poseurs, rich kids lightly slumming on daddy\u2019s dime in retro coffeehouses and loft apartments accessorised with $1,200 first editions of Naked Lunch.<\/p>\n None of them gives the slightest indication of any talent, or for that matter the application to pursue their chosen craft. (If they were for real, they\u2019d be in Bushwick or Hoboken, not rubbing shoulders with the hedge fund managers in SoHo.)<\/p>\n They\u2019re simply tripping on secondhand memories of a long-vanished counterculture to which Ed gives them vicarious access \u2013 even as he freely admits his acquaintance with legends like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso was fleeting at best. For Ed, being part of an artistic coterie \u2013 however ersatz \u2013 after all this time is like whistling a half-forgotten tune, the pleasurable twitch of a phantom limb. <\/p>\nLong-vanished counterculture<\/h2>\n
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