In “Jay Kelly,” George Clooney is a movie star in existential crisis

There comes a point in Noah Baumbach’s new film, “Jay Kelly,” where one tires of hearing the words “Jay Kelly.” The titular, fictional movie star, played by George Clooney, is a sort of cinematic stand-in for the actor, to the point where the character’s name has a distinctly similar phonetic sound and the same number of syllables as Clooney’s. Like his real-life counterpart, Jay Kelly is the name on everyone’s mind, the most famous person in any room. He can’t go anywhere without being swarmed by industry figures, fans and gawkers alike, who are mystified by the mogul’s sheer presence and filled with gratitude just to be breathing the same air as Hollywood royalty. Between Los Angeles and Paris, film sets and train cars, agents and makeup artists, Baumbach won’t let the viewer escape Jay Kelly. The circus is all a bit nauseating, and that’s the point: If we’re fatigued by just watching this spectacle, imagine living it.

Now far enough removed from his mumblecore roots in films like “Kicking and Screaming” and “The Squid and the Whale,” Baumbach is something of a tycoon himself. Four Oscar nominations, a massive Netflix deal and a co-writing credit on one of the biggest films of the century alongside his wife, Greta Gerwig, Baumbach has graduated from earnest indie filmmaker to Hollywood power player — as revered among Criterion collectors as he is casual moviegoers. It’s a trajectory that would make anyone’s head spin, no matter how long and hard they worked for their success, so it’s no surprise that Baumbach’s latest film finds the writer-director taking a beat to parse the chaos and try to remember what’s really important.

With “Jay Kelly,” which screens at this year’s New York Film Festival before opening in a limited release Nov. 14 and hitting Netflix Dec. 4, Baumbach is playing pensive, looking back to retrace his steps and examine all of the different roads not taken, with Clooney as his willing, compelling muse. Together, the two craft a self-aware, though no less banal, character study, examining the life of an artist who’s too famous to get off the ride — or perhaps, just too damn charming. In this occasionally saccharine yet blithely comical piece of rich-people-problems autofiction, Clooney is the funniest he’s been in years, taking shots at himself and the life he’s chosen with a marksman’s aim. For an actor who remains famously guarded despite being a tabloid staple, “Jay Kelly” is perhaps the closest a viewer can get to Clooney’s thoughts on his own fame this side of a memoir. And blended with Baumbach’s own neuroses, the film is a vain yet delectable dose of Hollywood humility, a crème brûlée that looks fancy and tastes great but isn’t so memorable after the thrill of cracking the top layer has subsided.

Ironic, then, that Jay Kelly is obsessed with a dessert equally as simple and beloved as the film bearing his name — or, at least, he was. Everywhere Jay and his entourage go, a piece of cheesecake follows, the last, haunting vestige of a star’s rider that should’ve been updated long ago. Jay’s manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), his publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), or his hair and makeup artist, Candy (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the film alongside Baumbach), are constantly clearing or grabbing a bite of an unwanted piece of cheesecake. It’s a gag that’s funny five times and trite by the sixth, only to round back toward something warm and amiable by the final time it appears.

“Jay Kelly” spends its runtime going through those same motions, just at different scales within the narrative. We know who this guy is from the top of the film, if only because the viewer also has an idea of who Clooney is. Baumbach and Mortimer write the character and his actor as closely together as possible so as to make the honest, emotional swings of their screenplay feel immediately resonant. But the problem is that means the audience is already familiar with Jay’s lavish white suits, his luxury brand deals, his esteem as both a dramatic and comedic actor, his coffee and car advertisements, the rugged allure of his perennial five-o’clock shadow and his many, many girlfriends. When those aspects of the character are at the other end of a punchline, the joke gets old fast, and “Jay Kelly” begins to feel like little more than a glorified version of one of Clooney’s Nespresso commercials. Still, these self-referential bits of Tinseltown glamour do feel like a nice, numbing place to rest your head when everything outside the movie theater — or your living room if, unfortunately, you must watch this solely on Netflix — is falling apart. Who says everything has to be doom and gloom all the time?

(Netflix) Laura Dern and Adam Sandler in “Jay Kelly”

Well, Clooney, for one. For much of his peak-fame career, Clooney has been using his time outside of film sets to advocate for human rights and progressive policy change, frequently putting his money, power and influence where his mouth is to get into the muck of politics and advocacy. In one recent instance from July 2024, Clooney called on his friend Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, and recalling the decision earlier this year, said, “I was raised to tell the truth . . . I also believed I had to tell the truth.” As it turned out, Biden leaving the race didn’t help the eventual outcome much at all. But though Clooney and others echoing his push couldn’t ultimately sway the result, it’s the honesty that is of value in a star as big as Clooney. Some may see his truth as a superficial one, but it’s a truth nonetheless, and it’s when he decides to excavate it onscreen that “Jay Kelly” rises above its more shallow, glitzy trappings.

Even Baumbach’s tertiary characters are more richly detailed than most filmmakers’ leads, and “Jay Kelly” is no exception, with Sandler turning in great, layered work (especially this close to the stink bomb that was “Happy Gilmore 2”) alongside Dern and Grace Edwards, who plays Daisy, Jay’s youngest daughter, who’s headed off to college in the fall. But it doesn’t take much for Clooney to outshine his bevy of co-stars, which also includes Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Patrick Wilson, Alba Rohrwacher, Louis Partridge and many more. A flash of the star’s 100-watt smile is all that’s needed to make the notion that Jay Kelly is one of the last great movie stars ring true. But that also means Jay — and by extension, Clooney — is part of a dying breed, a pack of screen actors who live for their art to the point where it consumes their lives and pushes out everything else. After acting out his own death on the set of his latest movie, Jay floats into a small but potent existential crisis, only exacerbated by Daisy’s trip across Europe, which leaves her abandoning her dad for the summer just when he finally has some time off. It’s only when Jay realizes that Daisy is finally old enough to throw her father’s extended absences right back at him that he starts to understand that being the best actor means he wasn’t the most present father.

(Peter Mountain/Netflix) Riley Keough and George Clooney in “Jay Kelly”

Here, Baumbach combines Clooney’s experience with one of the filmmaker’s favorite themes, the fragility of the family unit, to chronicle what happens to all of the dust that falls from a star during its meteoric rise. Through extended asides, Jay looks back on the pivotal moments of his career where he was forced to put himself first to achieve a dream; an audition alongside his best friend where only one person could get the part, or a love affair that began on a film set while his first wife was at home, pregnant. It’s telling that, in the latter sequence, Baumbach briefly appears as a version of himself, a nameless director on a Jay Kelly movie who haplessly contributes to a cycle of abandonment and rejection fed by the industry’s demands. It’s as if Baumbach and Clooney are silently agreeing that, in the pursuit of the public’s entertainment, someone or something will always be privately at stake.

Whether the audience buys that will depend on the viewer’s relationship to famous types. You’re more likely to get dividends from “Jay Kelly” if you put stock in the Hollywood machine. But Baumbach frequently wrestles with that response, especially as Jay wonders how much value there is in his work if he’s experienced so little real life because of it. When he decides to haul his posse along for an impromptu trip across Europe to follow Daisy on her summer vacation, Jay is frequently hindered by the weight of his own fame before being propped back up by relentless adulation. A particularly enjoyable sequence on a train from Paris to Italy sees Jay fawned over by travelers in the coach car, starstruck and asking him mundane, lowball questions that wouldn’t be out of place on a late-night talk show. When Jay walks past the only passenger who seems to be uninterested in the idol worship, sitting calmly in her seat, she asks, “Do you have any regrets?” It’s the only question that stumps him.

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But before the hubbub begins, as Jay boards the train and awaits the response from his adoring public as soon as they recognize him, he takes a moment to pause, watching passengers go about their day-to-day lives. They converse, kiss and check their watches. One woman paints rouge over her lips in the reflection of a window, on her way to a date, a party or some other event where her future isn’t scheduled out in front of her, a place where she can be anybody she chooses to be, even if only for one night. Here, Baumbach finds the emotional center, focusing on all of the small, romantic parts of life that can’t be replicated by an hour in the makeup chair before a day of filming begins. And while “Jay Kelly” might be dealing in the problems of the privileged, Baumbach wisely asks whether having a quiet moment to yourself, steeped in the beauty of uncertainty, isn’t its own kind of privilege — one that, just like fame, not everyone can be afforded.

It’s the softness that falls across Clooney’s face in this scene that tears down the wall between Jay Kelly and George Clooney. The movie star’s mask of artifice briefly vanishes, and all that’s left is a puppy dog look of yearning, a sad acceptance that it’s too late to change certain things. There are no second takes in life, no chances to do it over or perform it with a bit more verve and integrity. Once the big man calls cut, that’s it. It’s rare to watch an actor contend with their decisions so forthrightly, to admit to and accept the fact that they’ve let themselves be subsumed by stardom. A truly great performance must feel honest, and you don’t get to be one of the last great movie stars without telling the truth.