The inimitable Willem Dafoe brings his abundantly ruffled charm to this New York City story directed with pep by Kent Jones (Hitchcock/Truffaut, 2015). Dafoe plays Ed, a postal worker who hung with the Beat literati, though never reached the heights of Ginsberg and Burroughs. His only poetry collection, Way Past Go, fell out of print long ago. These days, Ed’s a postal worker, but a chance street encounter with Meyers (Civil War, 2024 actor Edmund Donovan), a snobbish NYU student, thrusts him into the attention of a would-be writers’ group and Past Lives (2023) star Greta Lee’s hot mess of a club singer, Gloria. Is this his moment, at long last? A gorgeously lived-in drama, it’s been adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s posthumously published novella of the same name by May December (AFF 2023) writer Samy Birch. With a dash of Kill Your Darlings (2013) youthful hope and a splash of Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) faded promise, Dafoe emotionally anchors this Venice Film Festival gem.