Jay Kelly Review: George Clooney Plays Himself, Only Not Really

NYFF: George Clooney Looks Back at a Fake Career in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly

“I don’t want to be here anymore.” That’s the first line we hear recited in-character by Jay Kelly, a world-famous movie star about to finish his last day on the set of an unspecified movie, in the opening moments of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Baumbach is a meticulous writer, and often pays precise attention to the lines that open and close his films, even if it seems naturalistic at first. (“Are you gonna let me in?” Greta Gerwig murmurs rhetorically to a fellow driver at the outset of Greenberg, and it echoes throughout the movie’s discomfiting romance.) But Baumbach has also been pushing himself as a director with some Netflix money behind his recent, ambitious projects, and that Jay Kelly line arrives during a lengthy, shadow-dancing tracking shot around the movie’s set, catching snatches of conversation (another Baumbach specialty) before landing on Kelly actually doing his last few takes. In a single dazzling sequence, the movie lays out the elaborate fakeness that’s constructed to orbit around its central star, however temporarily.

And getting more temporary all the time. A star of Jay Kelly’s age on Jay Kelly’s supposed level of fame and adulation feels like a cosmic anomaly or maybe even an anachronism. This, despite the characters’ verbal acknowledgments of the diminished global market for matinee idols; despite even the presence of real-life Last Movie Star George Clooney in the Kelly role. Baumbach, who has raised self-consciousness to an art form as well as an epic subject, anticipates what you might be thinking about this, too, and has Kelly and others talk about what it really means to “play yourself,” rebuking a common dismissal of movie-star artistry.

The self-referentiality doesn’t end there. Much later, when we see clips from throughout Jay Kelly’s career, the montage is made up of real Clooney projects. (What else could it be?) These winking acknowledgments may still result in Clooney not receiving due credit for his work. In the broad strokes, Jay Kelly is a Clooneyish star, sure. Looking closer, though, he’s more of a 60ish fiction extrapolated from the earlier days of Clooney’s movie career. That’s also why he feels especially anachronistic: It’s as if movies like One Fine Day and The Peacemaker (the latter heavily featured in the Kelly montage, if I’m not mistaken) became signature smashes, and Clooney never branched out into socially-conscious directing or the elder-statesman gravitas to understand his slow, natural fade. Jay Kelly turns the Clooney charm into something more plastic and pliable, a mask he may not be able to remove. Panicking as his younger daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) prepares to leave for college, reeling with barely-expressed grief and a little regret following the death of his early-career director and mentor Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), Kelly flirts with leaving the business entirely – while still rehearsing saying his name into the mirror, as if attempting to get a bead on his genuine self.

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It’s in this headspace that Kelly belatedly agrees to accept a tribute in Italy, hoping to lure the Eurotripping Daisy out to see him accept his trophy. (Baumbach makes sure characters mention the actual crafting of the trophy, emphasizing how this honor, too, is meticulously produced fakeness.) He invites his disapproving father (Stacy Keach) and semi-estranged older daughter Jessica (Riley Keough), too, and strong-arms his manager and de facto best friend Ron (Adam Sandler) into joining the trip, which involves an unnecessarily lengthy train ride. Kelly is attempting to assemble a makeshift family-meets-entourage, seemingly hoping that will supplement the movie montage and give his life some additional dimension. It has the opposite effect – on Jay, and on the movie itself. Baumbach started his career directing a superb comic ensemble in Kicking and Screaming; Jay Kelly is not that, very much by design, but his assemblage of clutch players (which also includes past collaborators Laura Dern and Greta Gerwig!) still feels scattered and diffuse. I could have watched an entire movie about the loving, privileged, yet semi-stressed relationships between Ron, his wife Lois (Gerwig), and their daughter (Sandler’s real-life kid Sadie). Instead, they provide a few not-quite grace notes for a story that isn’t really about Jay and Ron’s dysfunctional friendship – another storyline that could have been a killer focus for a whole movie.

Baumbach has worked with a variety of other writers over the years, on his own films and others’. Here, he co-writes with the terrific actress Emily Mortimer (who also has a small on-screen role), and it’s the first time his voice feels a little diluted, whether by choice or by process. His movies co-written with Gerwig are less acidic than the likes of Margot at the Wedding, but they’re sharp as hell, and wildly funny. For a bustling movie set in a self-reflective Hollywood bubble, Jay Kelly is surprisingly mild. It’s the first Baumbach comedy that’s more amusing than hilarious. There are obvious personal touches here – Peter Schneider is blatantly modeled on Peter Bogdanovich, who bonded with Baumbach – but it also sometimes feels as if the filmmaker is observing Jay Kelly from a remove, and without the joyful delirium some bigger-picture distance can entail. That first film-set sequence touches it, and then backs off.

Maybe that’s appropriate enough for a man who secretly worries he may have given himself too fully to illusion. Clooney has experience inhabiting empty suits, and in some ways Jay Kelly is the more serious-minded version of Baird Whitlock, the boobish actor he played in Hail, Caesar!. He’s often acting as if he’s projecting something, like Jay Kelly a beam of light emanating from an unseen source, glowing yet insubstantial. He has a terrific scene here opposite Billy Crudup, as an acting-school pal whose path diverged, perhaps somewhat forcefully, from his famous ex-friend; as the tenor of their conversation shifts, you can see how for Kelly, it’s playing out like a nightmare despite the predictability of his friend’s feelings. Sandler is also quite good as Ron; “I’m Jay Kelly, too,” he says at one point, referring to the industry created around a movie star, and of course he doesn’t get to share in the same glory, or even approximate 15% of it. Baumbach and Mortimer casually reconcile the put-upon provider and the privileged rich guy of so many past Sandler comedies, and give him pathos besides.

The other material Jay Kelly recalls isn’t as easy to clear as a bad Sandler comedy. There are hints of The Life Aquatic, which Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson, with its absentee father who may not be a great artist either, as well as Anderson’s train-set Darjeeling Limited. Gorgeous as Jay Kelly is, and as funny as it is in moments, it can’t help but feel a little minor by comparison – a little easy, even, on its man-who-wasn’t-there protagonist. Baumbach finds another note-perfect closing line, but for the first time in a long while – maybe, for me, ever? – it caps a good movie that nonetheless feels incomplete.

Director: Noah Baunbach
Writers: Noah Baumbach, Emily Mortimer
Starring: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Grace Edwards, Laura Dern, Riley Keough, Greta Gerwig, Patrick Wilson, Billy Crudup
Release Dates: September 29, 2025 (New York Film Festival); November 14, 2025 (limited theaters); December 5, 2025 (Netflix)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

NYFF: George Clooney Looks Back at a Fake Career in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly