In ‘Jay Kelly,’ The Star Eclipses the Story

In Noah Baumbach’s new film, Jay Kelly, the title character is a movie star who looks, acts, and feels remarkably like George Clooney. With his crinkled eyes, silver hair, and a world-weary gravity masked by a wolfish grin, Jay is a man both acclaimed and criticized for building a career on variations of the same alpha-male persona. A highlight reel of his work even features clips from Clooney’s own films, like Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight. This meta-commentary is clever, yet the film often pulls its punches, opting for knowing, mirthless chuckles instead of the genuine belly laughs that a more daring project might have pursued.

This reluctance to go for broke is emblematic of the movie as a whole. Baumbach is a skilled filmmaker, adept at dramatizing artistic tension and creating authentic showbiz textures. The script, co-written with Emily Mortimer, confidently navigates Hollywood dealmaking and draws inspiration from Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, framing the existential angst of an aging A-lister through a series of flashbacks during a trip to accept a lifetime achievement award.

The film’s references to cinematic classics like 8½ and All That Jazz are intelligent and meticulously controlled. However, this very control becomes a weakness. Unlike the ambitious miss of Baumbach’s White Noise, Jay Kelly feels so polished that it risks canceling itself out. Its pathos seems machine-tooled, unfolding as a slick and predictable gloss on human messiness, shedding what feel like crocodile tears for a protagonist too rich and famous for his problems to resonate fully.

This character type is familiar territory for Clooney, who has previously explored elegant, anxious malaise in films like Michael Clayton and Up in the Air. While this familiarity is part of the point, it also highlights that the actor is more compelling as an outright clown—as in his work with the Coen brothers—than as a vessel for sad-sack melancholy. Baumbach and Mortimer give Jay serrated edges, revealing the narcissism threaded through his self-deprecation, but Clooney’s performance never quite conveys why this man is a world-historical movie star who could paralyze a room. His wattage feels dim compared to the unsettling, all-in charisma of a Tom Cruise.

Jay’s journey toward self-awareness is catalyzed by a chance encounter with an old acting classmate, Tim (Billy Crudup), who holds a decades-long grudge. The reunion devolves from beer-drenched nostalgia into a brawl, shaking Jay enough that he abandons a prestigious project and instead decides to chase his skeptical, college-bound daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), around Europe. This impulsive trip, which his daughter never asked for, reroutes the lives of his support staff, whose paychecks depend on their willingness to enable him.

While Jay’s story falters, the film finds its footing on the margins. The satire of executive-class travel and the quasi-purgatorial nature of celebrity service is sharp, with the best lines gifted to Jay’s long-suffering entourage. His manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), and publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), are former lovers now bound together by the vortex of bad vibes spiraling off their client. “He doesn’t love us the way that we love him,” Liz complains, while Ron, an inveterate people-pleaser, embodies a good-natured self-effacement born from a lifetime of managing Jay’s crystalline neediness.

The film walks a fine line between humanizing a difficult character and letting him off the hook, and too often it leans toward the latter. Baumbach, who can be an unsparing dramatist, doesn’t make Jay squirm enough. His betrayals are frequently framed as situational rather than sinister, creating frictionless scenes that lack the bristling tension of a work like Marriage Story.

It is Adam Sandler who supplies the film with its soul. While Jay struggles with the unsurprising realization that he’s an asshole, Ron’s agony is far more compelling. He is a man tying himself in knots over a life spent profiting from—and defining himself by—that same asshole. Sandler, reprising the subtle depth he showed in Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, delivers a robust, humane performance that virtually completes his costar’s. His devotion to his larger-than-life boss becomes the film’s most affecting and multifaceted relationship.

Baumbach bookends Jay Kelly with scenes that explore the meaning of retakes—the thrilling, terrifying quest to capture a perfect moment. In two different contexts, Jay is heard asking, “Can I have another one?” The emotional weight of the second request is undeniable. But it also suggests, indirectly, that the movie itself could have used a do-over.

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