Greta Lee is no stranger to late fame. Having acted professionally since her teens, the Los Angeles native didn’t hit a breakout role—it came in the 2023 film Past Lives—until she was 40. Lee’s latest endeavor recalls the New York she came to back in the day, hoping to make it as an actress. In the scrappy, intimate Late Fame, Lee stars as the singer Gloria, who with a group of downtown creatives attempts to resurrect Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a poet turned post office worker who long ago gave up his writing. He’s a symbol for New York City as it once was, a place of cheap rents that allowed young people the time and space they needed to find their voices. “New York City had this currency and agency in terms of being central to art or whatever your endeavor was,” Lee told Cultured magazine. “Now I don’t know if that is the case anymore because of the Internet and our access to so much at all given points. It’s not necessarily even New York anymore.” —Maggie Turner