Film Reviews

December 5, 2025

"Jay Kelly" is a bit of a mixed bag. It's an acceptable but ultimately uninspired dramedy that's often just as wandering and confused as its title character. It tries to be about too many people and convey too many well-worn messages that it just sort of sputters out. Along the way, there are some honest and touching moments, which give us a taste of what it could have been had it focused its efforts on just a select group of characters and allowed them to explore fresher, less overt narrative territory.

To be clear, we get what director Noah Baumbach, working from an original screenplay he co-wrote with Emily Mortimer, wanted to do, and we know that Baumbach has it in him to do hard-hitting drama well (see "The Squid and the Whale"), but the problem may be that he has too many valuable resources at his disposal, and attempting to put them all to use when they're not needed gives the movie unnecessary weight. One of his assets, of course, is the first-rate cast, which includes George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Mortimer, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, and Stacy Keach, who are all capable of contributing to a quirky, human-centered story. It's just a shame the screenplay didn't give their characters more interesting things to do. If it had, maybe many of them wouldn’t have exited halfway through, which often felt abrupt, but it was probably for the better.

Clooney plays Jay Kelly, a famous Hollywood actor who, even in his later years, still has commercial appeal, although he suspects he's past his prime. When the movie opens, during a virtuoso long take and Steadicam shot from the team of cinematographer Linus Sandgren, which takes us all around a dark sound stage, Kelly is just about to wrap his latest movie, and his longtime, loyal manager, Ron (a strong and poignant Adam Sandler, who steals every scene he's in), has already booked him for his next gig. But the historically self-centered Jay wants a change of pace, and in fact, he banked on spending the next couple months in L.A. with his youngest of two daughters, Daisy (Grace Edwards), before she goes off to college. Daisy, naturally, would rather be with her friends, and more specifically, backpacking around Europe, sleeping in hostels and riding in class-less trains, which goes against the lifestyle of her celebrity dad, with his sycophantic entourage and private jets.

One of the film's clear-cut messages is that money doesn't necessarily buy happiness, and that having endless means and people to fulfill your every whim (in Jay's case, this includes a slice of cheesecake at every turn, even though he can't remember when he first asked for it) can leave one feeling hollow and directionless, and asking themselves, "What have I been doing with my life?" While this is a fine theme to explore, "Jay Kelly" does it in often clunky, in-your-face ways.

When Jay's seasoned director friend (Jim Broadbent), who happened to give him his first big break, passes away, it leads to a reunion and subsequent falling out with a fellow actor (Billy Crudup), who recounts how Jay backstabbed him. This episode is later shown in a flashback, which is unfortunately a case of the movie both showing and telling. Jay watches on as his younger self (Charlie Rowe) consciously decided that fame was more important than loyalty, and he hears the wise words of his acting teacher, who says, "You want to be a star? Now you got to act twice. Once when you play the part and then again when you play yourself." Could Baumbach not think of a more understated way to communicate the point that superficiality and selfishness can have karmic fallout? It's one of several instances when the movie feels heavy-handed.

Another comes in the form of the Dern character, Liz, Jay's outspoken and highly opinionated publicist. She's a bit stereotypical, and her scenes, which come after Jay decides to haphazardly hightail himself and his faithful retinue to Europe to meet Daisy, feel disingenuous and melodramatic. She's perpetually on her phone, she flips her nose at the people who ride trains, and her line to Ron (with whom she has a romantic history the movie doesn't properly unpack), "We're not to him as he is to us," is one of many that didn't need to be so explicit. We get the sense Baumbach does not always trust his audience with subtlety and resorts to "movies about Hollywood" tropes, along with broad, exaggerated behavior from characters who don't really need to be here. You take Liz out, for instance, and you're not missing much.

I stress "not always trust" because there are moments when "Jay Kelly" does feel truthful and introspective. Sandler plays a big role in this, with his soft voice, droopy face, and heavy eyes that look like they're on the verge of shedding tears. He's exceptional at playing a man who, deep down, knows—but has not fully accepted—that he needn't be at the beck and call of Jay, lest he forsake his own health and happiness. When Ron says to another client (Patrick Wilson), "I'm just jetlagged, and I'm tired, and I'm old," our hearts break for him, and it pains us to see him prioritize Jay over his own wife (Greta Gerwig) and their two kids, although the movie hints he'll find the gumption to break free.

Another great performance comes from Riley Keough as Jay's eldest daughter, Jessica, an elementary school teacher who carries a lot of resentment toward her father. She's angry that he could convincingly play characters who are tender and attentive to his children but in real life he would be so absent and detached. There's an effective scene between Jessica, Jay, and Jay's therapist, Carter (Josh Hamilton), that could have gone sideways and drifted into unintentional comedy or forced melodrama, but Baumbach and the actors lend it just the right amount of delicacy that it feels authentic.

I should mention that Clooney is good too, and he easily—almost too easily—fits into the role of Jay. It's impossible not to buy him in this part, which feels like a cross between Danny Ocean from the "Ocean's" movies and Matt King from "The Descendants." It's one that requires emoting the right amount of finesse and ignorance because Jay is a character you both like and despise at the same time. We pity him because he's so emotionally unaware, yet we also think he gets what he deserves, which I'll not reveal.

As natural and charismatic as Clooney is though, what I think would have been a bolder move by Baumbach was to not cast someone as well-known as Clooney in the lead, because his presence and popularity ultimately make the movie too safe and predictable. As I mentioned, we've seen Clooney play this type of man before, and by extension, we feel like we've seen many aspects of this movie before, and not just because of Clooney, but because of where the screenplay takes his character. We have a strong sense of Jay’s arc and the lessons he'll learn, and this takes away some elements of surprise. "Jay Kelly," for the most part, merely fulfills our expectations.

The movie also pushes its meta and symbolism onto us a tad too aggressively. In one sequence, we watch a series of movie clips featuring Jay, which are actually Clooney's real-life roles, a choice that feels slightly self-indulgent. Another self-aware moment comes when Jay talks about doing a vodka ad, and many may know that Clooney founded his own brand of tequila. There's also a scene when Jay runs off into the woods, which recalls a similar moment from "Michael Clayton" when the title character, played by Clooney, did the same thing.

These wink-wink touches are nostalgic and clever to a degree, but less probably would have been more. Plus, when we watch them in the context of other traditional mid-life crisis plot developments, such as when Jay attempts to appease and reconcile with his distant father (Keach), the collective message is too on-the-nose: that a lifetime of stardom means little without true friends and family with whom to enjoy it, and that forging and maintaining intimate relationships are pivotal to avoiding regrets later in life, especially when mortality starts to creep in, a notion the movie presses upon us too conspicuously when Jay finds himself in the middle of a cemetery.

"Jay Kelly" is technically proficient and pretty to look at (the way Sandgren captures Los Angeles, Paris, and Tuscany is warm and inviting), and on narrative level, Baumbach gives us some mildly genuine and heartrending moments, but overall, it's too formulaic. It mostly reinforces conventional ideas about living and maintaining a lavish Hollywood lifestyle at the expense of real human connection. In the end, we care about the characters and hope they find absolution, but the journeys the movie takes them on so that they might reach important points of realization are not the most original or interesting.