#REVIEW: “JAY KELLY”

Review by Nicholas Porteous for Mr. Will Wong

In Noah Baumbach‘s latest bittersweet Dramedy, George Clooney is Jay Kelly, an aging movie star in the throes of existential grief, and it’s no coincidence his name sounds so familiar. Baumbach leans into Clooney‘s legacy as a cinematic shorthand for the life of a Hollywood icon. We’re meant to envision Clooney‘s career–in one case, quite literally–as the foundation for Jay Kelly‘s conundrum: is it worth sacrificing time with your friends and family for unimaginable fame and fortune? You’ll never guess where a guy with unimaginable fame and fortune lands on this question.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to feel sympathy for George Clooney as he ponders the true value of his endless wealth and success. Millionaires and movie stars are allowed to feel sad and empty. There’s a profound movie to be chiseled out of that idea. But particularly in 2025, you really have to build that case to earn an audience’s heart. For all the money on screen and the stacked cast, Jay Kelly flounders as an incisive character study of a one-percenter. Kelly‘s flashbacks to an acting class, a pivotal audition, and uncommitted moments with his daughters feel too general to resonate, and the reflective scenes in the present are equally vague. There’s no real drama to be gleaned from Kelly‘s train ride through Europe to accept a lifetime achievement award, and the comedy feels too insubstantial to register beyond the odd guffaw here and there. After a very questionable therapy session–I think we’re supposed to laugh at the therapist’s overdramatic stock methods–Kelly tells his daughter “the best way to make an audience cry is to NOT cry!” It’s a curious line, because Jay Kelly often disregards its own advice–pushing multiple characters to shed light tears when a stoic gaze might have landed more truthfully.

It’s always wonderful to watch Adam Sandler stretch dramatically, and his performance here as Kelly’s assistant is impeccably, buoyantly downcast, but I think he’s misapplied in a movie so focused on a single character’s celebrity. Sandler‘s presence on -screen blunts Clooney’s loneliness. We’re meant to see Kelly as a peerless star, trapped in a self-made, golden cage of isolation. But whenever Sandler‘s around, pretending not to be an equally famous megastar, Clooney doesn’t feel nearly as alone as Jay Kelly wants us to imagine.

Ultimately, Jay Kelly is a movie about a staggeringly handsome and successful star who feels deeply unfulfilled by the sum total of his life choices. His world feels airy, aimless, bland. Unfortunately, Baumbach does too good a job bringing this empty and unsatisfying world to life with a conflict-free, whimsy-light film–too breezy to amount to anything much beyond an obvious statement about the limits of stardom.

Netflix Canada release JAY KELLY, playing now at TIFF Lightbox, and arriving on the streaming service December 4, 2025.