Both in life and in the movies, things are not always what they seem. The award-winning career woman may look successful, but after the celebratory crowd goes home, she’s left alone with dark thoughts and anxiety. The set of a prestigious film may sound like an exciting prospect, but behind the scenes, chaos and hurt feelings threaten to take over the spotlight. The comedian looking to charm the crowd might be a lot less funny off-stage as he fumbles through his new life away from his wife and kids. 

Bradley Cooper’s straightforward NYFF closer “Is This Thing On?” opens with Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess Novak (Laura Dern) finally agreeing to end their marriage. As they start to uncouple their lives, Alex finds comfort in New York City’s stand-up comedy scene, while Tess returns to her love of volleyball as a coach. Although their lives seem to be moving in different directions, there’s still the lingering chance of “what if?” and a second shot at finding happiness together. 

Although the writing of “Is This Thing On?” is not as funny as a tight ten-minute set of one’s favorite comedian (it’s much more somber than the premise lets on), Arnett and Dern are phenomenal, immediately tapping into the complicated and conflicted feelings their characters have for each other. As each partner digs their problems deeper and deeper, undoing the progress they’ve made, they capture something believable about the experience of hurtling towards making mistakes in the heat of an argument and not quite saying what needs to be said. They’re each naturally funny, yet unafraid to get serious and vulnerable. With a supporting cast that includes Cooper, Andra Day, Christine Ebersole, Sean Hayes, Peyton Manning, and Amy Sedaris for a brief “BoJack Horseman” reunion, the pair have plenty of different comedic foils to commiserate with their characters’ problems.

Cooper’s comedy of remarriage feels a bit more unpolished than his previous movies, such as the adaptation of the showbiz cautionary tale “A Star is Born” and the Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro.” Here, the heightened emotions threaten to overtake the movie. While the handheld camera work intensifies the whirlwind experience of a situation spiraling out of control, it ends up feeling like a double exclamation point at the end of a sentence. The stand-up scenes are almost too uncomfortable to endure, but the powerhouse team of Arnett and Dern make the best out of some rocky scenes to share the last laugh.

In Milagros Mumenthaler’s “The Currents,” Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola) is a celebrated fashion designer who seems to have it all: a thriving career and a loving, picture-perfect family. But after accepting an award in Switzerland, Lina throws herself off a bridge, leaving herself in a state of shock after escaping the water. The lingering, uneasy feelings follow her back from the icy lake to Buenos Aires. Unhappy with her life, she struggles to acclimate to her roles as mother and wife, and her creative process also seems to have been affected. Work is no longer the escape it once was. Undergoing a rebirth of sorts out of this time of crisis, Lina must decide what her new life will look like going forward. 

“The Currents” is a complicated portrait of a woman on the edge of a breakdown—or is it a breakthrough? As Lina figures out her new reality, Mumenthaler and cinematographer Gabriel Sandru follow her highs and lows in numerous close-ups, punctuated with pops of color like Lina’s bright red lipstick and a sky blue coat in the Switzerland scenes to draw the audience’s eye in to see what her lead actress is doing with the subtle movements of her face. 

González Sola plays Lina with a sense of sympathy, slowly unpacking how a successful, confident woman becomes unable to speak about her darkest thoughts. She’s subtle in her movements, like when Lina carefully applies coats of bright lipstick to act as if everything is fine, but her increasingly unkempt hair is the physical manifestation of her tangled state of mind.  

Mumenthaler channels the work of Lucrecia Martel, bottling up the suffocating isolation of middle-class life in Argentina, into a psychological study of one woman trapped by the pressures to “have it all.” As with Martel’s “The Headless Woman,” the jarring brush with death unmoors Lina from the rhythm of her daily life. The perfect husband seems less stellar in the face of a crisis. She’s increasingly exhausted from the demands of motherhood and her career, with no relief in sight. 

Her annoyance with her mother-in-law intensifies as she senses the other woman’s disapproval of her behavior. She throws herself into her work because that’s her easiest coping mechanism, but her mind is elsewhere, and she can no longer hide behind her crumbling facade. Eventually, she visits her mother, which unlocks another piece of Lina’s life and her mental health struggles. 

In the case of Ulrich Köhler’s “Gavagai,” a reimagining of a classic Greek text becomes the launch pad for a larger conversation on race, gender, and equality. Written and directed by Köhler, “Gavagai” uses a restrained narrative of a movie within a movie as a meta commentary to illustrate a variety of thorny issues, especially the power dynamics of a European film shooting on location in Africa. There are also race and gender imbalances to sort through in the relationship between the two lead actors, who, for various reasons, can’t or won’t be able to move forward in their steamy romance. 

Emotions are high on the set of a new adaptation of “Medea.” Fashioned in a fictional world blending futuristic clothes and modern-day items like a modestly tricked-out boat, the scene where Medea played by Maja (Maren Eggert) shows her murderous brutality to her husband Jason as played by French Senegalese actor Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) isn’t going to plan, and a diminutive tyrant, the film’s director Caroline Lescot (Nathalie Richard), enters the frame screaming. The shot must be reset, and as her lead actress walks out, extras are wandering off, and Medea’s supposedly dead children have taken the boat for a joy ride. 

But these are hardly the worst issues. As Maja and Nourou embark on a passionate on-set affair, it soon becomes apparent they’re not getting equal treatment. When the film jumps forward to the movie’s imminent European premiere, Nourou is left out in the cold, almost quite literally, when a hotel guard tries to kick him out of the property for smoking, something that would have happened to a white member of the film team. A silent air of discontent hangs over “Gavagai” as these microaggressions add up. 

The Medea movie within a movie looks comically misguided, but that’s hardly the issue. The film’s primary focus is on how the industry treats its workers with minimal power, as it explores issues of representation and gatekeepers. There are many uncomfortable moments of yelling and disrespect towards the African cast and crew, especially from Lescot, who appears to be modeled after Claire Denis. Later, at a buzzing press conference, it becomes apparent that Lescot is clueless about how her film is perceived and relies on the Black members of the cast to defend choices they didn’t make. Meanwhile, both Maja and Nourou are coping with their own feelings of inequality, whether that’s to be seen as more than a commodity or to be accepted into the world they’ve staked their careers in. 

About midway through Kent Jones’ “Late Fame,” I heard the last thing I ever expected to hear at the New York Film Festival: the voice of Ezra Pound. The aged speaker is not identified, nor is the poem he’s reciting; if you don’t know one or both, it won’t register. The film’s protagonist, Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), is a New York poet who quit writing verse decades before but still listens to the greatest hits of yesteryear. That’s how he happens to put on a recording of Pound reading his Canto LXXXI: What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross/What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee/What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.

In Jones’ extraordinary comedy-drama, Ed, now a longtime employee of the post office, is accosted one night in front of his downtown apartment building by a young man (Edmund Donovan) who professes not only to know the one book of the older man’s verse that was published in 1979, but to revere it. More than that, he is part of a group of young New Yorkers, the self-styled Enthusiasm Society, who likewise cherish his work. Once he’s persuaded to visit the group, Ed finds a collective of earnest twentysomethings from various creative disciplines who look to the past for orientation and inspiration.

“Late Fame” was scripted by Samy Burch from a fiction by Arthur Schnitzler, which sharply satirized the bohemianism of early 20^th century Vienna. But satiric skewering isn’t what Burch and Jones are up to here. They ask us to take their 21^st century bohos with a measure of seriousness, albeit with a smile and perhaps a raised eyebrow. They stand purposefully against a culture of “influencers” and internet drivel. Who wouldn’t agree with that?

Their choice of cultural avatars is interesting. They know Ginsberg and Burroughs, but little or nothing beyond the Beat era, it seems. Although it’s never said, it could be that Ed’s 1979 verse represents the end of the long, noble tradition they worship, after which came the deluge of mass media rubbish. Also interesting is that most of their literary heroes belong to New York culture. Which is why it’s curious that the pinnacle of their literary pantheon at one point is summarized as “Whitman, Pound, Williams.” The middle name in that trinity not only wasn’t a New Yorker but was arguably American literature’s most notorious antisemite.

In the film’s press notes, Jones says, “It was very important to me to deal with real poetry in the movie … Pound is obviously a problematic figure from a political standpoint, but his greatest poetry and his effect on the world of poetry is something else again—that’s why Ginsberg and Pasolini paid homage to him.” Jones’ choice of how to represent “real poetry” was a bold one, and in my view, it connects his film with two others I saw in the initial NYFF press screenings. All three are by independent directors based (formerly in one case) in New York, and their films suggest interesting, if very different, relationships between film and poetry–and our current cultural moment and the past.

The three films appear in the context of the New York Film Festival’s 63rd edition, which runs Sept. 26-Oct. 13 at Lincoln Center. This year’s schedule is varied and promising. Among the highlights: Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner “It Was Just an Accident” by Iranian master Jafar Panahi; Venice’s Golden Lion winner “Father Mother Sister Brother” by Jim Jarmusch; two by Richard Linklater, “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon,” the latter with Ethan Hawke in an acclaimed performance as Lorenz Hart; two by Romanian provocateur Radu Jude, “Dracula” and “Kontinental ’25”; the world premiere of Bradley Cooper’s comedy “Is This Thing On?”; biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” with Jeremy Allen White as the Boss; “Anemone,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis in a film directed by his son; “The Secret Agent” by Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho; Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly” starring George Clooney as – what else – a movie star; Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Cannes prize winner “Sentimental Value“; and Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite“. And that’s just a partial list.

To return to “Late Fame”: The members of the Enthusiasm Society that Ed Saxberger encounters are believable as contemporary New Yorkers even if their interests belong to bygone times. They are not all poets–there’s a playwright, a critic (oops, make that an essayist), and so on–and they sport the affectation of identifying each other only by their last names. Their apparent leader, the one who first met Saxberger, is Meyers, and he appears a bit older than the others. All are male, with one very notable exception: Gloria (Greta Lee), an actress who plays the roles of mother figure, temptress, shape-shifter, romantic ideal, betrayer, etc.

Saxberger is initially surprised and baffled by the hero worship visited on him, but he quickly softens as he sees the admiration is genuine. An early turning point in their relationship comes one day when he’s invited to Meyers’ home. He finds a large, impeccably decorated apartment adorned with blown-up covers of books by William Carlos Williams and others. This revelation leads Ed, who grew up working-class, to the realization that not just Meyers but other (or all?) members of the group are the products of wealthy families. Does this invalidate their cultural enthusiasms? Or merely invite us to understand them in the context of today’s burgeoning class differences?

In the film’s first act, we witness both the attraction and the growing tension between Saxberger and his disciples. They are planning an event and are insistent that he read a poem at it. He refuses to read anything new as he stopped writing years before, but he reluctantly agrees to let Gloria read one of his old poems. The tale’s second act showcases two remarkable performances, though not the ones we earlier expected. One is Gloria’s extraordinary rendition of the Kurt Weill/Bertold Brecht song “Surabaya Johnny.” The other, which happens after Gloria fails to appear to read Saxberger’s poem, features Ed himself rising to the occasion and reciting a poem that not only seems to fit the lineage of “Whitman, Pound, Williams,” but also suggests how he may have reached the stage of burnout years before.

I found the film the film to this point incredibly captivating due to the very subtle and ingenious writing and the three terrific performances at its center. As Saxberger, Willem Dafoe, one of our greatest actors, gives a career-best performance that captures the poet’s mix of intelligence, exhaustion and lingering aspiration. As Gloria, Greta Lee adds to her outstanding work in “Past Lives” with a brilliant turn that creates a woman of complex talents, ambitions and fears. And Edmund Donovan’s Meyers is a revelation, a portrait of a man intoxicated by the past but unsure of how to handle the group he’s formed to worship it.

Although full admiration for “Late Fame,” I must admit that I found its third act less than fully satisfying. Partly that may be because the questions it poses are difficult, or well-nigh impossible, to answer persuasively. But the film chooses to ask such cogent and fascinating questions, and does so with wit and imagination, that it emerges as one of the year’s best.

Exemplifying a rather different idea of poetry, Ira Sachs’ “Peter Hujar’s Day” had an unusual beginning. In 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz had the idea of asking various artist friends to sit with her over a tape recorder and narrate what was they did the previous day. These talks were supposed to result in a nonfiction book, but that never materialized. And the tapes she made in her apartment with photographer Peter Hujar were lost. What survived were transcripts of the tapes, which resurfaced a few years ago.

Sachs’ film restages that conversation with two Brit actors, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, playing Hujar and Rosenkrantz. Hujar thinks the day before was boring, and it may have been somewhat typical, but his unfolding recollections make clear that it was also full of incident and, perhaps more importantly, endless thoughts about what these things meant to him.

Some of his interactions involve famous folk. He recounts a conversation with friend Susan Sontag, who’s about to fly off to Paris. The longest anecdote describes his New York Times assignment to photograph Allen Ginsberg, whose dingy E. 10^th St. digs Hujar seems to regard as hipper than his own E. 12^th St. pad. He tells about the minor hassles he encountered in reaching Ginsberg and getting him to pose (the poet doesn’t want a standard portrait) and then his thoughts turn to how much he’s getting paid. (He’s doing work for Vogue and other top publications, so he seems to be earning a decent living.)

Sachs’ film clearly can’t be described as a drama. It certainly has elements of documentary, as some of his previous films, especially his striking debut, The Delta, have. In terms of documenting urban areas, his two great subjects have been Memphis, where he grew up, and New York, his home as an adult. In this outing, he obviously wants to offer an accurate evocation not just of a place but also of a time (roughly the same as that referred to in Late Fame: the 1970s) and a cultural milieu. And for Sachs, that milieu conjures not only a certain chapter in downtown art history but also of “queer history”: Hujar, whose work has grown in reputation in recent years, died of AIDS related causes in 1987 at the 53.

Those personal and cultural resonances, as well as the film’s documentary-like precision in evoking them, are reasons why I would submit “Peter Hujar’s Day” as an example of poetic cinema. And there’s another: the beauty and understated elegance to Sachs’ photographic approach to the film. One decision he made I think was absolutely right: he doesn’t show us any of Hujar’s photographs, or photos of him, even in the closing credits. Instead, he uses various techniques–shifting focus, zooms, changing lighting patterns, and an intent gaze at Whishaw (who is brilliantly low-key)—to give us a cinematographic document that again and again testifies to the poetic nature of the medium, something that’s present in every film but is strikingly crucial in this one.

The poetic aspect of Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” is different from those of the two films discussed above, and for well over half of this sly, droll film, you might not even suspect it. Reichardt’s story begins in 1970 Framingham, Massachusetts, and tells of a guy named Mooney (Josh O’Connor), who lives an unremarkable suburban life with his wife and two young sons, but craves more. So he conceives of heisting four modernist paintings from a local museum, and enlists three lowlifes as accomplices. Rather haphazardly, the bandits succeed in making their way out of the museum with paintings in tow.

But Mooney’s life doesn’t get any simpler. His problems were probably inevitable given that he’s an amateur criminal, prone to mistakes that professionals surely wouldn’t make. How to hide the paintings? One indelible scene has him hauling them, with no small difficulty, into the loft of a barn, with grunting pigs his only company.

Soon enough, his family and dim accomplices left behind, he’s on his own, a would-be mastermind on the lam. At first, he hopes to take refuge at the home of an old pal (John Mangaro) but the man’s wife (Gaby Hoffmann) seems to smell trouble on him and gives him the boot.

Once the hapless Mooney is alone, what I call the film’s poetic aspect emerges. That happens, in effect, as the story’s background moves into the foreground. Earlier, we have seen brief glimpses of newspaper headlines and TV reports about the Vietnam War. But as we approach the story’s end these grow more frequent and detailed, and in the final scene, Mooney finds himself engulfed in a parade of antiwar demonstrators who are besieged by police. In a sense, this isn’t a satisfying as a dramatic or narrative conclusion to the story of a man who has staged an art theft. Rather, it’s a poetic transposition that makes the film’s real story the era when the story takes place, an era of political division much like our own.

Kelly Reichardt is one of the American independent cinema’s real treasures, one whose films are always touched with cinematic poetry. “The Mastermind” benefits from the excellent work of many of her collaborators, but of special note are cinematographer Chistian Blauvelt, whose images help conjure the mood and look for the 70s, and Rob Mazurek, whose jazzy score radiates infectious energy.