The Myth of the Movie Star: New Trailer for Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly

For a filmmaker associated with intellectual quarrels around Brooklyn dinner tables and complex relationship studies, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly feels like something else entirely, a glossy meta character study about a man whose existence has been swallowed by Hollywood. Today, the film premiered at the New York Film Festival. The new trailer was also released, which you can watch here. 

The trailer suggests a film of existential questioning, the reckoning of a hollow, detached life. Real memories seem to blur with movie scenes, familial connection feels out of reach. He shares that he always feels alone, though he is never really alone. He is constantly orbited by his manager played by Adam Sandler and publicist played by Laura Dern. 

Baumbach, co-writing with Emily Mortimer, pushes into terrain he’s circled before, like identity, self-deception, and the fallout of success, but with a bigger canvas and a more overtly cinematic subject. Instead of the familial battles of Marriage Story or the academic malaise of The Squid and the Whale, Jay Kelly dismantles the persona of a star. Clooney, long considered the embodiment of effortless charisma, becomes the canvas for a story about the exhausting labor of holding up a mask that the world refuses to let slip.