“It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody else at all,” reads the opening title card of Jay Kelly, quoting Sylvia Plath’s journals.
It’s all spelled out, right there in the first few seconds: Jay Kelly is about the man who everyone knows as the famous actor Jay Kelly, although Jay Kelly doesn’t seem to know who he really is underneath his Jay Kelly veneer. But the strange thing about Jay Kelly is that—though it seems to be a mirror for the star playing Kelly, George Clooney—this actor isn’t a stand-in for his real-life counterpart at all (despite featuring in a montage of real Clooney roles).
Noah Baumbach’s film follows Kelly as he tries to navigate his late career anxieties and fears of being a deadbeat dad, not just to the adult daughter he already let down, but to his youngest who is about to go away to college. He has fraught relationships with everyone, from his daughters to his manager/best friend Ron (Adam Sandler). He pushes them further away the more he tries to break down his “Jay Kelly” persona (which is what alienated them in the first place), all while he tries to find the real man underneath.
It is easy for anyone that knows him personally to take a stab at Kelly. He stopped being human to become a movie star. As Kelly journeys across France and Italy to attend a celebration of his work but also attempt to self-righteously reconnect with his youngest daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards), Kelly steps into flashbacks of the younger, pre-fame Kelly, from his early betrayals to his first loves. These moments are tinged in their own sadnesses as much as they are absorbed nostalgically by Kelly, as if he is watching the movie of his own life—ostensibly tragic, but something he can’t help but fall in love with.
While his climb to the top pains all involved, Baumbach plays Jay Kelly as a self-deprecating comedy. Anytime Kelly tries to tell Daisy that he spends most of his time alone, his security man will come up behind him and hand him a beverage. It’s a pointed tension that Baumbach derives all his laughs from, but there is another tension underlying the whole project that is less funny or sad. Just odd. This tension is found between how much of the film is seemingly about Clooney’s character being at odds with the Clooney persona itself, while in actuality being a deconstruction of its filmmaker. It is no mistake that the opening, The Player-esque oner on a movie set, which culminates in a demonstration of Kelly’s talents, is really a show-off move by the director.
Every moment of Jay Kelly lives between the textual (the internal conflict of the fictional actor) and the metatextual (what the story tells us about the real creative forces behind the film). The flashbacks call to mind Bob Fosse’s self-critiques in All That Jazz, or Federico Fellini analyzing his own romantic buffoonery and artistic impotence in 8½. Both those works are explicitly about the filmmakers behind them, where the stars play versions of the directors themselves. Here, Jay Kelly is a half-step between Clooney and Baumbach, too far from both to be directly truthful about either.
In this way, Jay Kelly is in line with Baumbach’s previous films, where the lead is a kind of Baumbach stand-in (Adam Driver in White Noise, Ben Stiller in While We’re Young), although with Kelly being a particularly hyper-inflated self-flagellation as Clooney’s star power maximizes the film’s egoistic comedy. This approach—using somebody in a similar but not quite the same line of artistry to stand in for oneself, like following a music composer in Lucchino Visconti’s Death In Venice (the deathly make-up sequence from which is referenced towards the end of Kelly)—can work, but only if the portrait is still willing to be guttingly honest with itself.
Instead, Baumbach transposes bits of his own life here, but from much more distance than his searingly personal Marriage Story: An early mentor figure wears a signature neckerchief, clearly in reference to the late Peter Bogdanovich, who played a major role in Baumbach’s second feature Highball. The fiction implies there is some personal regret towards that eternally ended relationship, but is that really the case? Rather, Baumbach seems to be using this film to speculate on his own fears around his capabilities to let people down.
This is best embodied by Billy Crudup’s character Timothy, an old acting school friend who resents Kelly for stealing the career that he believes was rightfully his (and also, bizarrely, has his hair styled like Baumbach). Is this moment of self-reflection taken from a literal instance in Baumbach’s life? Is he showing regret for his success compared to the troubles that Whit Stillman—his clearest cinematic forefather—has subsequently had, in the same way he thinly veiled Adam Driver’s character in While We’re Young as a patronizing version of Joe Swanberg?
These questions only really remind audiences that Jay Kelly isn’t really a character—just a series of reactions. It’s impossible for Kelly to know himself because Kelly isn’t written that way. Even the past-tense version of him, the aspiring actor, is little more than a thin, trite concept. He is a blank slate to project ideas and feelings onto, one which hijacks Clooney’s face and charisma to retell the same arc of mild personal penitence that steered Baumbach’s films for the last decade. The thing they have most in common is that, like Baumbach, Kelly always asks for another take.
Director: Noah Baumbach
Writer: Noah Baumbach, Emily Mortimer
Starring: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Grace Edwards, Stacy Keach, Jim Broadbent, Patrick Wilson, Eve Hewson, Greta Gerwig, Alba Rohrwacher, Josh Hamilton, Lenny Henry, Emily Mortimer, Nicôle Lecky, Thaddea Graham, Isla Fisher
Release Date: November 14, 2025; December 5, 2025 (Netflix)
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