Jay Kelly
Noah Baumbach (2025)
The title character in Noah Baumbach’s latest is a hugely successful movie star suffering a late-midlife crisis. He’s played by George Clooney, now in his sixty-fifth year. Early reactions to Jay Kelly, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is now showing at the London equivalent, have been lukewarm. Baumbach, Clooney and the other smart people involved in the picture would have known that inviting sympathy for an exceptionally fortunate protagonist might not prove universally popular, and that plenty of people would speculate how much Clooney ‘is’ the man he’s pretending to be. The movie they’ve made asks for trouble in both departments. The decision to ask for trouble – which seems mystifying – is one of the more interesting things about Jay Kelly, which is sometimes entertaining but mostly frustrating and bland.
Jay, who currently lives alone except for his house staff, has had two failed marriages. Neither ex-wife appears in the film, but Jay’s two daughters do, although he’s virtually estranged from the elder daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), who tried acting but now runs a children’s day centre. Eighteen-year-old Daisy (Grace Edwards) is about to travel in Europe before starting university. An early scene between her and Jay suggests she’s fond of her father while finding him and his luxury lifestyle preposterous. He proposes they spend a fortnight in Europe together, before Jay starts his next picture, but Daisy wants to be with friends her own age. Jay got his start in cinema thanks to British director Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), whose stock has fallen in Hollywood but with whom Jay’s still friendly – though not friendly enough to lend his name to a film project that Schneider, desperately hoping to revive his career, needs financing. It’s Schneider’s sudden death and the immediate aftermath to his funeral that sharpen Jay’s feelings of regret and precarity. At the funeral, he bumps into Timothy (Billy Crudup): best friends when both were aspiring actors, they’ve not been in touch for decades. In a restaurant-bar, they talk and drink and Timothy, a child therapist now, reveals that he hates Jay for (as Timothy sees it) stealing his acting future. He was up for a role in the Peter Schneider picture that launched Jay, who came along to the audition supposedly just to give his friend moral support. In the event, Jay also read for the role and got it. Their meeting at Schneider’s funeral culminates in angry words in the bar – Timothy has inside information (he and Jessica are Facebook friends) that Jay’s a lousy father – and a punch-up outside. Timothy is left with a broken nose, Jay with a black eye and accusations ringing in his ears.
He flies to Europe a day or so later, with his manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), and publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), both of them anxious to know how Jay got his shiner. Since he’s not quite as bankable a star as once he was, they’re also exasperated – Ron particularly – by Jay’s second thoughts about doing the movie he’s due to start shooting. The official publicity line is that Jay will visit Paris as a Dior ambassador before heading to Tuscany to pick up a lifetime achievement award at a film festival there: Ron fixes this despite Jay’s earlier refusal of the festival’s invitation, though he’ll now have to share the spotlight with another award recipient and client of Ron’s, Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson). Jay’s real motive in heading for Europe is to keep tabs on, and accidentally-on-purpose meet up with, Daisy, who’s on her way to a jazz festival in Paris – until she isn’t. Jay has another member of his entourage tracking the credit card transactions of one of Daisy’s companions. When he finds out Daisy and co are getting a train out of Paris, Jay instructs his team to buy tickets for the same train, unaccustomed as this Hollywood A-lister is to public transport. His starstruck fellow passengers are thrilled to see him; Daisy, whom Jay finds in another carriage with her new, French boyfriend (Théo Augier Bonaventure), less so, especially when she discovers how her father has been monitoring her itinerary. She angrily walks out of the carriage and except for a brief farewell sequence and a subsequent flashback to her and Jessica’s childhood, the film.
Plenty happens en route to and in Italy. To cut a long story short … Ron and Liz solve the black eye mystery when they learn Timothy is threatening to sue Jay for breaking his nose. The train passengers include a pair of cross-country cyclists, one German (Lars Eidinger), the other Dutch (Ferdi Stomfeel). When the German steals the handbag of an elderly English woman (Janine Duvitski) and jumps off the train, Jay hares after him, eventually wrestles the man to the ground and retrieves the handbag; the Dutchman explains that his companion is a decent chap on medication for some kind of mental illness. The handbag-owner and her travelling companions – whom Jay has already invited to be his guests at the film festival tribute – are even more in awe of him, now they know he’s a true hero. Ron arranges for Jay’s father (Stacy Keach) to fly from his home in Maine to Tuscany, never mind that Kelly père and fils have never hit it off. Ron’s also able to report that the damages suit has disappeared, Jay’s lawyers having unearthed an old drugs charge against Timothy. Mr Kelly senior doesn’t stay the course at the festival and returns to Maine. Ron has lunch with Ben Alcock, who takes that opportunity to fire him. Dismayed by Jay’s lack of interest in anyone but himself and anxious to get back to his own loving wife (Greta Gerwig) and their needy, tennis-player daughter (Sadie Sandler), Ron announces he no longer wants to work for Jay. Ron does, though, agree to accompany him to the tribute ceremony, which is also the finale to Baumbach’s film.
Like Jay Kelly, George Clooney hails from Kentucky. Beyond that and screen celebrity, there’s not much obvious biographical common ground between them. After a short marriage to Talia Balsam, Clooney had plenty of high-profile romances, but he didn’t tie the knot a second time until 2014, when he married the human rights lawyer, Amal Alamuddin; they’re still together. The couple’s twin girl and boy, Clooney’s only children, were born in 2017: he’s hardly had time to be the bad father that Jay is. Unlike Jay, he has a famously positive relationship with his own father Nick, the former TV news journalist and anchorman. Those eager to link the film’s narrative and George Clooney’s life story will probably find significance in the latter’s middle name of Timothy, but no one seems to have suggested that Clooney shafted a friend or fellow actor to get his big career break. Yet plenty of the LFF audience were audibly keen to spot further connections. When Jay is asked if he’s ever considered running for political office, an amused, almost excited ripple ran through the Royal Festival Hall: aha, here’s something we know George Clooney has often been asked! Setting much of Jay Kelly’s action in Italy, where the Clooneys are bringing up their children, may have a similar tantalising effect. The film’s playing up to audience expectations in this way reaches a disastrous climax at the Tuscany ceremony. In his theatre seat next to Ron, Jay watches, on a screen above the stage, a montage of scenes from his best-known movies. Baumbach could surely, with the help of CGI, have concocted invented images of his leading man for the montage. Instead, he shows us clips of some of George Clooney’s most famous screen appearances. Although Jay’s memories of his daughters as children are also mixed in (this is the last of several sequences in which sixtysomething Jay ruefully observes moments from his past), this Clooneyfication just about kills Jay Kelly as cinema with a life of its own.
A quote from Sylvia Plath’s journals – ‘It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all’ – appears on the screen at the start. The epigraph suggests the film means serious existential business, but this hardly materialises. Jay does also share with Clooney a genial, nice-guy persona. Baumbach and Emily Mortimer, who worked with him on the screenplay (and also plays Jay’s personal make-up artist), do little to suggest that maintaining his public image either denatures Jay or makes him a fraud. They soft-pedal even on the portrait of him as exploitative and egocentric. A film shoot is taking place under Jay Kelly‘s opening titles – the last day of shooting for Jay’s most recent movie – and, while the star is demanding, he seems genuinely popular with the crew. He’s an imperfect father, a less than faithful friend, and, in relation to his entourage, an ever-pampered child; but Jay’s adoring fans on the train journey have no reason to be disillusioned. He not only catches a thief but even expresses sympathy for the thief’s mental health issues.
What existential angst there is seems almost decorative. The Italian settings take Jay Kelly not only closer to George Clooney’s (main) home but also into culturally pretentious territory – Fellini, even Dante … The story’s main theme – the self-questioning of a big name in cinema – and, in particular, a nocturnal sequence on a lonely road, call to mind 8½. (The fairground flavour of Nicholas Britell’s score in the closing scene and into the end credits also has echoes of Nino Rota’s great music for the climax to Fellini’s film.) In the road sequence, Jay chases the taxi that’s taking his father back to the airport. He realises his pursuit of the car is hopeless, but he keeps on running. Another vehicle, containing Ben Alcock and his retinue, pulls up beside Jay who, after a brief conversation with Alcock, wanders into an actual selva oscura. There, he imagines a conversation with Jessica, in which he tries to persuade her to come to the tribute ceremony. He succeeds only in triggering a flashback that explains why his elder daughter so resents him.
Although there are some nice details, this script isn’t one of Noah Baumbach’s best. It’s effective how the lawsuit is dealt with, and that the middle-aged Timothy returns to the obscurity from which he had briefly emerged. (After the altercation with Jay, he’s not seen again bar a glimpse of him in Jay’s guilty imagination.) Much less effective is Jay’s alfresco lunch in Tuscany, with Alba (Alba Rohrwacher) and his other festival hosts. A hush suddenly falls over the table; Jay’s companions are all engrossed in their phone screens; one says ominously, ‘You’re all over the internet’. Jay holds his breath, we’re meant to do the same – but we don’t, knowing that if someone had videoed Jay’s fight with Timothy, it would have gone viral days ago. The video on the phones is, of course, a recording of Jay tackling the handbag thief; the silence breaks, excited chatter resumes. There’s a tiresome running joke about Jay’s assumed liking for cheesecake, a standing dish in the catering for any event he’s at: he insists to Ron et al that he got sick of cheesecake years ago. Just before the ceremony in Tuscany, a subdued Jay automatically picks up a slice of cheesecake from the desserts table. I hoped Baumbach was about to redeem the joke by having Jay, preoccupied with other thoughts, wolf down his bête noire entirely, before realising what he’d done. Alas, he registers distaste after a mouthful or two and returns the plate to the table.
Jay Kelly is hardly short of good actors but in many cases their roles are condescendingly written: Baumbach and Mortimer, at least as much as the main character, treat them as satellites to planet Jay. Adam Sandler is likeable as long-suffering Ron, juggling Jay’s capricious demands with his own family responsibilities, but these play as filler, despite Greta Gerwig’s efforts, mainly on the other end of a phone line, to liven things up. A brief mention of Ron’s sometime romance with Liz – thwarted because her priority was her job with Jay – comes across as a token gesture to pad out Laura Dern’s skinny part: there’s no further mention of Liz after she decides, before the train heads to Italy, to leave the party, in order to be with her son. Grace Edwards’ Daisy is an appealing blend of humour, candour and increasing vexation but the outstanding supporting performance comes from Billy Crudup. Shortly before the mood of their reunion shifts irrevocably, Jay reminds Timothy how, in their student group, everyone admired him as the true method actor among them. He begs Timothy to read the restaurant menu – first without, then with, emotion. Timothy obliges. What Billy Crudup does in the next minute or so is hilarious, and elating – it’s not only the best moment of Jay Kelly but one of the screen highlights of the year. Once his character comes out with his true feelings about Jay, you also realise, of course, how good Crudup was when Timothy feigned friendliness.
The less satisfying acting contributions are linked to the screenplay. Stacy Keach is one-note as Jay’s father, but the script has supplied no good reason for the character to turn up in Tuscany, where he repeatedly disparages his son, has a brief health scare then, despite Jay’s pleas, heads home. Baumbach must like working with Lars Eidinger (who appeared in his previous film, White Noise (2022)) and as the crazy cyclist-thief, Eidinger certainly looks the part – but that part is underwritten to rather tasteless effect. A more crucial problem comes in flashbacks to the young Timothy and Jay’s auditions for Peter Schneider. They’re first seen in an acting class, where Timothy (Louis Partridge) is supposedly tremendous and Jay (Charlie Rowe) mediocre. At the Schneider readings, Timothy is nervous and doesn’t do well: he’s cut off after a few lines before Jay steps in to change both his and Timothy’s lives. The contrast between the acting class and the audition doesn’t work, though, because Louis Partridge isn’t very brilliant in either.
George Clooney is a twenty-four-carat film star and a first-rate screen actor. He has some fine bits here: in Jay’s reactions to Timothy’s menu readings; perhaps especially when Jay, looking in the mirror, speaks the names of other movie stars – Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Robert de Niro – while bleakly recognising that he’s stuck with being Jay Kelly. (That’s as close as the film gets to connecting with the opening Plath quote.) Clooney’s charisma, and emotional expressiveness behind the dazzling smile, are never in doubt, but Jay Kelly is such a questionable project for him. The hectic prologue on the film shoot, leading into illustrations of Jay’s challenging diary and high-handedness, lend the story a satirical veneer, yet Jay Kelly is predominantly soft-hearted, and shallow. When Jay is first on the train, his relish at rubbing shoulders with ordinary mortals is comically excruciating. Unfortunately, Baumbach’s portrayal of the fans (played by, among others, Patsy Ferran and Jamie Demetriou) is so patronising that you can’t help feeling Jay isn’t alone in being up himself. And it’s frustrating, given what the film is meant to be about, that, after Jay’s burst of authentic heroism, Clooney has no opportunity to show what that means to the man he’s playing.
This can only be conjecture but I had a growing sense that Clooney himself, while attracted by the self-analysing pretensions of Jay Kelly, was more comfortable still with its amusing superficiality: Jay’s putting his screen persona to real-life use in tackling the bad guy, is a clear example. That misconceived closing montage of his own career highlights may reflect, as much as anything, Clooney’s affection for cinema and gratitude for the success he’s enjoyed through it. At the very start, on the film set, Jay asks for another take that the director insists isn’t needed. Baumbach rhymes this with Jay’s final reaction to seeing his past before his eyes, which brings tears to them. Turning to camera, Jay asks, ‘Can we go again? I’d like another one’. Those words should be ambiguous – Jay wanting a second chance at making personal relationships work, at least as much as his movie career over again – yet the double meaning doesn’t come through. The film’s ending succeeds chiefly in putting a seal on its sentimentality.
12 October 2025