TL;DR: Jay Kelly is George Clooney’s most introspective and emotionally vulnerable performance in years — a meta-Hollywood dramedy that mixes Fellini flair, Baumbach melancholy, and Clooney charisma into a story about fame, regret, and the people waiting for us when the cameras stop. It’s funny, heartfelt, and just surreal enough to feel like a dream you definitely had after binge-watching Netflix at 3 a.m.
Jay Kelly
I’ve watched George Clooney rob casinos, glide through space, break out of a Depression-era chain gang while singing like an Appalachian angel, and try to fire people with weaponized charm. But nothing — and I mean nothing — prepared me for Clooney playing the most challenging role of his career: George Clooney. Or rather, a lightly fictionalized Clooney-shaped construct named Jay Kelly, a man so beloved, so handsome, and so universally adored that everyone, including himself, has started to wonder whether he’s even real. As far as Hollywood meta-comedies go, Jay Kelly feels like Noah Baumbach cracked open the Matrix, sucked out the celebrity neurosis, and poured it onto celluloid with the tenderness of a filmmaker who knows how absurd and how fragile this entire industry is.
The movie is sold as a love letter to Hollywood, but it’s more like Hollywood leaving a voicemail that starts romantically and ends with a nervous breakdown. And Clooney? He just lets us listen in.
Jay Kelly is, at its pulsing center, a self-discovery story wrapped in satire, wrapped in wistful nostalgia, wrapped in a Clooney mug you could use as your Netflix profile picture. From the opening frames, Baumbach and co-writer Emily Mortimer spin their story like a surreal scrapbook of fame. Kelly is a 60-year-old actor who has everything except a sense of self, a man whose entire life has been spent pretending so convincingly that he no longer remembers which parts he actually lived. When he murmurs, my life doesn’t really feel real, it hits with uncomfortable resonance. I’ve spent decades trying to explain Hollywood to my less geek-inclined relatives, and the best I’ve ever managed is: it’s a place where everyone is performing even when the cameras aren’t rolling. Jay Kelly captures exactly that truth — and Clooney plays it with that lethal combination of charm and melancholy that made half the planet fall in love with him circa ER Season 3.
One of the film’s sharpest strokes appears early, when Kelly runs into Billy Crudup’s character: a former acting partner turned ghost of professional betrayals past. Crudup absolutely chews through the emotional scaffolding here, calling out Kelly’s hollow center with the precision of a surgeon who has just discovered you’re made of cardboard. Is there a person in there? he asks, slicing through Kelly’s celebrity sheen and launching the entire narrative’s existential meltdown. I don’t know who first pitched Clooney and Crudup trading emotional haymakers in a Baumbach movie, but give that person an honorary Oscar and a lifetime supply of espresso.
From that point on, Jay Kelly becomes a road movie of the soul, with its engine sputtering somewhere between Fellini dreamscape and Hollywood confessional. And like all great confessional stories, the truth comes with casualties. We learn that Kelly didn’t simply climb the Hollywood ladder — he stepped on people while doing it. Not maliciously, but carelessly, the way many ambitious people do when they confuse momentum with meaning. His long-time manager (Adam Sandler, soft and soulful in a way only middle-aged Sandler can deliver) and his publicist (Laura Dern, who could win an Oscar for glaring at a phone) are the emotional collateral damage. They’ve given their lives to prop up a man who, in return, gave them… scheduling conflicts.
There’s a devastating moment where Dern’s character breaks and screams, we’re not to him what he is to us. I felt that line in my sternum. Not because I’m a global celebrity with an entourage (though if Absolute Geeks ever lets me hire a handler, I promise to at least learn their dog’s name), but because Baumbach uses Hollywood as a mirror for the more universal heartbreak of asymmetrical relationships. Jay Kelly isn’t just a movie about an actor. It’s a movie about anyone who has ever placed work above the people waiting for them at home.
Kelly’s daughters, played with gut-punch honesty by Grace Edwards and Riley Keough, are the emotional wreckage he left behind. There’s an unforgettable scene where his eldest tells him, do you know how I knew you didn’t want to spend time with me? Because you didn’t spend time with me. As a film critic who has bailed on more family dinners than I’d ever admit to the group chat, that line felt like Baumbach opened my calendar app and judged me personally.
Visually, Jay Kelly is drenched in classic film nods and dreamlike flourishes. In one scene a priest licks two ice cream cones, and suddenly we’re in full Fellini territory. In another, Kelly wanders into a mist-filled forest, the kind of surreal transition that would feel pretentious in lesser hands but lands beautifully here because the movie has already established itself as an unstable blend of memory, fiction, and cinematic language. At one point, Kelly revisits his own filmography through a glitchy retrospective montage that pulls from Clooney’s real-life roles like Combat Academy and Up in the Air. The movie becomes self-referential in ways that are funny, tender, and occasionally disorienting — the way looking at old family photos is disorienting, especially when half the memories are ones you faked for social media.
There’s also a running gag in which Kelly tries to maintain his youth with a Sharpie, coloring his eyebrows with the same quiet desperation many of us use while experimenting with Snapchat filters at 2 a.m. It’s played for comedy, but it’s layered with the sadness of a man who fully understands time is not a negotiable contract.
But the most impressive trick Jay Kelly pulls off is its refusal to turn into a Hollywood roast. Sure, it could have skewered the entire industry with acidic venom. God knows Hollywood provides enough material. Instead, Baumbach goes for something riskier: empathy. This is a story not about ego, but about caretaking. Not about celebrity, but about responsibility. If you walked into this movie expecting Clooney to do a victory lap on the meta-celebrity joke treadmill, prepare for something heavier and more meaningful.
Italy plays a significant role in the film’s final act — because of course it does. If you gave Clooney a globe and told him to point to his emotional homeland, he’d rotate it until Lake Como winked at him. But the Italian sequences are some of the best in the film. A train car full of strangers falls under Kelly’s spell, and for a brief moment, he seems like the version of himself the world wants him to be. Yet even that charm offensive bends back into melancholy. The film understands the paradox of Hollywood stardom: the more a celebrity tries to be loved, the further they drift from the people whose love actually matters.
Do the themes get a little too on-the-nose at times? Yes. There’s literally a scene in a cemetery that made me whisper, alright Noah, we get it. Mortality exists. But even the heavy-handed moments feel forgivable because the film is swinging big. And unlike its protagonist, it actually follows through.
In the end, Jay Kelly is less a Hollywood satire and more a cinematic therapy session for anyone who has ever asked themselves whether they’ve become the worst version of their most successful self. It blends metafiction, nostalgia, Hollywood history, and classic Baumbach neuroticism into something uniquely charming, unexpectedly moving, and quietly profound.
