PLOT: An aging movie star (George Clooney) struggles to reconcile the choices he’s made in his career with the toll they’ve taken on his friends and family.
REVIEW: Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly is tailor-made for George Clooney. Of all the modern movie stars, he’s one of the few left who have maintained a certain aura — a mystique. He’s old-school in the way someone like Cary Grant or Paul Newman was, and his presence is what makes Jay Kelly work as well as it does. You have to believe that Jay Kelly could be a movie star, and Clooney is nothing if not believable in that role.
Many will be tempted to see parallels between Kelly’s career and Clooney’s own, especially as a sizzle reel of the actor’s past movies is used toward the end when the star is given a tribute at a film festival. Yet, the movie examines the hollowness, at times, of a movie star’s life. Kelly, at first, isn’t unlike what we imagine Clooney to be — affable, charming, and well-liked by all as he completes his latest movie (in an elaborately staged oner that introduces the entire cast). Yet Kelly also has two daughters he rarely sees, a few ex-wives, and perhaps no real friends, surrounding himself instead with a retinue of employees who act as a surrogate family.
They are led by Adam Sandler as Ron, his long-time manager, who treats his clients like family, endearingly referring to them only as “puppy,” the same way he calls his own kids. To Ron, Jay is family — but is the reverse true?
Indeed, Jay initially seems like a nice guy, but Baumbach quickly pulls away the layers when Kelly has a chance encounter with an old colleague from whom he once stole a career-making role. The friend, played by Billy Crudup, appears in a bravura scene where their initially friendly encounter soon goes disastrously awry, sending Kelly into a midlife crisis that ends with him hopping a train to Paris in the hopes of reconnecting with his youngest daughter (Grace Edwards), with his employees in tow.
While it’s Clooney’s show, Baumbach has assembled a great supporting cast, with Sandler at his best as the mensch-like Ben, who invests too much in the friendships he believes he has with clients to whom he is little more than hired help. Sandler excels at playing these nice-guy characters, but he’s also believable in the moments when Ben must pivot to ruthlessness — such as when he handles a vicious shakedown or tries to finagle a new part for Jay, whose career is on the downslide as he ages. Laura Dern is especially good as Jay’s publicist, who increasingly starts to resent being dragged away from her own family to serve Jay’s whims, seeing through the nice-guy façade more clearly than others.
Through it all, Clooney maintains our sympathy for Jay. For all his faults, he isn’t presented as a bad person — just hollow. He’s spent no time building a life for himself outside of his work, to the particular resentment of his oldest daughter (Riley Keough, in a small but strong part). The movie grows especially potent in the third act when Kelly reunites with his estranged father, played by a memorable Stacy Keach, and starts to realize just how empty his life truly is.
Yet for all the incredible performances, Jay Kelly isn’t a perfect film. It’s marred by a somewhat indulgent tone, with Baumbach occasionally lapsing into broadly comic moments reminiscent of his lighter fare like Mistress America. Baumbach did a better job with this kind of tone in his masterful Marriage Story (although I didn’t care for his last movie, White Noise). It’s jarring to have near-slapstick moments interfere with the drama, with the tone recalling late-period Blake Edwards, when he was making darker films such as S.O.B. There’s also a heavy dose of Fellini’s 8½ as Jay reflects on his youth, with reenactments of earlier moments from his life portrayed by Andor’s Kyle Soller (it’s refreshing that they didn’t use AI de-aging techniques and opted to go old-school). It’s also a bit too long at 135 minutes, but these imperfections can’t take away from what really works in the movie — namely, the performances.
It’ll be interesting to see how Jay Kelly is received once it opens in theaters (it goes into limited release on November 14) and hits Netflix (on November 5). As a celebration of Clooney and Sandler’s talent, it absolutely works, and even if it’s inconsistent and oddly shaped at times, it tells a story that resonates beyond the privileged world it depicts.
