Jay Kelly is Noah Baumbach at his most openly sentimental, a movie about a movie star in late middle age looking back at the breaks that made him and the choices that cost him. For a filmmaker whose sweetness usually rides under acid, this is a different rhythm. The big emotional swells are front and center, sometimes moving, sometimes blunt, almost always unusual for Baumbach.
George Clooney is the only plausible choice to play Jay, and the film knows it. A penultimate tribute sequence cuts to a montage of Clooney’s actual career, from Michael Clayton and Ocean’s Eleven to The Thin Red Line and Intolerable Cruelty. It is a startling gesture that flattens the boundary between character and star. In that moment the film finds a boldness and a clarity that much of the first two acts only hints at.
Up to then the pieces do not always click. Adam Sandler, as Jay’s longtime manager Ron Sukenick, threads a strong B story about the cost of proximity to fame. He is always on call, always bailing on family, always one crisis from another, and Sandler plays the erosion with a tired kindness that sticks. The edit keeps his quiet beats scattered across long stretches, which makes them harder to knit into a full ache. You can feel the better version that centers Ron and lets Jay’s life refract through him.
Baumbach prefers to drift through Jay’s memories. A bar reunion with a former acting classmate, played by Billy Crudup, sours when the theft of a breakthrough part is dragged into the light. Other recollections nibble at a theme Baumbach has explored before, the way success is often built on other people’s unseen losses. The film says this plainly, then says it again, and the repetition dulls the sting.
The ensemble helps. Crudup is first sympathetic then furious, precise in both. Patrick Wilson shows up as Ben Alcock, another of Ron’s clients, and his shared tribute with Jay produces a few perfectly awkward set pieces. Laura Dern, as Jay’s publicist, locates a tender melancholy in a long simmer with Ron that never quite happened. These players keep the movie alive when the memories turn schematic.
Clooney gives a generous performance. He lets vanity and charm flicker, then recedes to make space for the people who built the scaffolding around him. It is interesting work, even when the writing courts platitude. You can see what drew him to a part that lets him examine legacy without self-flagellation (although there’s plenty of it in the final ten minutes, albeit well deserved).
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This is not peak Baumbach for me. The film circles its ideas and often delivers them with a heavy hand that you do not feel in Frances Ha or Mistress America, where specificity and bite carry the day. Yet Jay Kelly does find its pocket by the end, when the montage gambit lands and the warmth stops apologizing for itself. The result is a mixed bag with a memorable finish, a late style swing that flatters its star and, in flashes, broadens its director.
Score: 6/10
Jay Kelly (2025)
- Cast: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Greta Gerwig, Jim Broadbent, Patrick Wilson, Riley Keough, Grace Edwards, Charlie Rowe, Louis Partridge, Alba Rohrwacher, Sunny Sandler, Sadie Sandler, Jackie Sandler
- Director: Noah Baumbach
- Genre: Comedy, Drama
- Runtime: 132 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: December 5, 2025
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