Director - Noah Baumbach 
Writer - Noah Baumbach, Emily Mortimer
Cast - George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup
Duration – 132 minutes
 
For Noah Baumbach, Jay Kelly isn’t just a film — it’s an exorcism. Three years after his White Noise meltdown at Venice, the director returns to the same festival that once broke his spirit, this time armed with a bittersweet reflection on fame, failure, and the creative impulse that refuses to die. Co-written with actress Emily Mortimer, Jay Kelly plays like the cinematic equivalent of a midlife crisis — only it’s not Baumbach’s alter ego who’s spiralling, but George Clooney’s.
 
Clooney stars as Jay Kelly, a Hollywood megastar who suddenly decides to walk away from everything — fame, films, and his fractured family — after a chance reunion with an old friend forces him to confront the emptiness beneath the glamour. He drags his entire entourage across Europe — his long-suffering manager (Adam Sandler), a perpetually frazzled publicist (Laura Dern), and his stylist — in search of the daughter he lost somewhere between premieres and photo ops. The setup has all the makings of a self-aware Hollywood satire, but Baumbach aims for something more melancholy: a reckoning with his own artistic burnout and the strange love-hate relationship artists have with their craft.
 
Much like White Noise, Jay Kelly is filled with chaos — both literal and emotional. But where White Noise drowned in its irony, Jay Kelly leans into earnestness. That shift feels both refreshing and disarming. The film opens with a meticulously orchestrated tracking shot through the set of Kelly’s latest film — a kinetic symphony of chatter, movement, and cinematic illusion that recalls Hail, Caesar! and Babylon. From there, Baumbach and Mortimer peel away the layers of performance, exposing not only the mechanics of movie-making but the hollowness it can conceal.
 
Clooney, ever the symbol of old-school movie stardom, gives one of his most vulnerable performances in years. He plays Kelly as a man trapped in perpetual self-parody — charming, controlled, and utterly adrift. There’s an eerie pleasure in watching Clooney effectively play himself, especially when Baumbach turns the lens toward questions of identity: Where does the actor end and the persona begin? In a sly meta touch, the film’s climax uses clips from Clooney’s real career — Michael Clayton, Up in the Air, The Descendants — as Kelly’s “greatest hits” montage, blurring the line between fiction and confession.
 
But the heart of the movie doesn’t belong to Kelly. It belongs to his manager, played by Adam Sandler in a quietly devastating performance. His devotion borders on servitude — a man so consumed by his client’s dreams that he’s forgotten his own. Sandler channels the same aching vulnerability he showed in Punch-Drunk Love, reminding us that beneath his comic bluster lies one of Hollywood’s most empathetic actors.
 
If Jay Kelly falters, it’s in Baumbach’s newfound sentimentality. The film often teeters on the edge of self-indulgence, its therapy-session energy occasionally overwhelming the narrative. Cameos from Greta Gerwig, Isla Fisher, and Jim Broadbent feel more like comfort blanket than storytelling device — a reminder that Baumbach has indeed brought all his friends to group rehab. And yet, there’s a strange charm in that openness, a sense that the filmmaker has dropped his intellectual armor and chosen sincerity over cynicism.
 
By the end, Jay Kelly becomes less about its protagonist’s redemption and more about Baumbach’s own. As Clooney’s character stares at a montage of his cinematic legacy, mesmerized by the shimmering illusions of film, it’s hard not to feel Baumbach speaking through him: yes, creation is painful, absurd, and fleeting — but the magic, somehow, endures.
 
Baumbach trades his razor-sharp irony for wistful self-reflection in Jay Kelly, a tender, self-aware ode to the agony and ecstasy of making art. Clooney and Sandler are both remarkable, and while the film occasionally drifts into indulgence, its emotional honesty makes it one of Baumbach’s most human works yet.