‘Jay Kelly’ Review – Noah Baumbach Makes A Case For The Magic Of Movie Stardom [NYFF 2025]

What makes a movie star, and why do they matter?

Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach’s latest feature film, asks these questions at an opportune time. After roughly a decade of fretting about the state of movie stardom, Hollywood has a new cohort of young actors who are redefining the concept for the social media age. However, even with the ascendancy of the Chalamets and the Zendayas, the Boomer movie stars still have a chokehold over the public’s imagination. Actors like Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, and George Clooney still command the spotlight and emanate an aura of command of this unique, multi-generational zeitgeist.

Jay Kelly, the film’s titular character, would stand beside those stars if he were real. Like Roberts, Washington, and his portrayer Clooney, Jay Kelly is still active and vibrant in the industry. He breezes through a film set with his matinee-idol hair and elegant egotism, leaving everyone starstruck. However, he knows his days are likely numbered, and is reckoning with his place in Hollywood and the lives of his inner circle. The two reckonings intersect when he travels to Italy to accept a lifetime achievement award that he initially rejected. He uses the award as an excuse to reconnect with his daughter, who’s backpacking through Europe, and to escape a spate of bad press after getting into a fistfight with a former friend. Jay’s tunnel vision to try to right his wrongs leaves his team, including his manager Ron (Adam Sandler) and publicist Liz (Laura Dern), on cleanup duty.

Jay Kelly is a film that naturally favors either valorizing or skewering celebrity culture. (After all, Hollywood loves to tell stories about itself using the broadest strokes.) It’s impressive, then, that Baumbach attempts a more nuanced approach to Jay’s relatively sedate midlife crisis. Baumbach doesn’t directly frame Jay as a faded, or even jaded, aging star. Jay dazzles in front of the camera, with Clooney turning his effortless charisma on to the max to make his stardom undeniable. When he hops on an Italian commuter train to “coincidentally” run into his daughter, he also charms the other train riders, going as far as to invite them to his award ceremony. It’s a scene that reminds us what movie stars are capable of at their highest level: a greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

That capability comes at a cost, though, to the star and their loved ones. The same charm that Jay uses to dazzle the public has a darker, self-involved side. He can be aloof about how his actions impact others, and ruthless in pursuing and preserving his career. The commonality of these two ostensibly opposing traits is their little regard for Jay’s family, colleagues, and team. He doesn’t consider that he ruined Ron’s family plans by going to Italy at the last minute, or humiliated the director who gave him his big break by rejecting his plea to lend his name to a comeback project. 

Baumbach holds Jay responsible for all his worst traits in several ways. While the film is from Jay’s point of view, we see and hear how his behavior harmed his loved ones, often in their own words. We also see that Jay’s approach to his life and career isn’t industry-standard. Ben Alcock, played by Patrick Wilson, is an insufferable actor in his own right, but family and friends surround him in his limo bus, while Jay is essentially alone. The least successful finds Jay in active flashbacks, walking amongst and, in some cases, narrating his memories. It slows the film’s relatively zippy momentum down and leans too heavily towards the valorization side of the celebritydom spectrum. However, those scenes are few, keeping the film from permanently drifting from its set lane. That also helps the film’s conclusion land much harder than if it stuck to oversentimentality. 

The choice of nuance over sentimentality extends to Jay Kelly’s performances. George Clooney is in movie-star mode here, and he’s splendid at radiating this intoxicating aura while wearing a megawatt smile. When Baumbach asks him to dig deeper to confront Jay’s mistakes, Clooney’s vulnerability is affecting, as if he were using the script as a form of thinly guarded therapy. Even better is Adam Sandler, who delivers one of the year’s loveliest performances. As comedy is second nature to him, Sandler focuses his energies on conveying Ron’s withering acceptance of Jay’s lack of regard for him and how it’s all worth it to him because of their ostensibly one-sided friendship. There’s an aching gentleness in Sandler’s work – how he looks at Clooney (and an underutilized Laura Dern) – that will sneak up on you and break your heart before you even realize it.

Eventually, Jay does come to realize how instrumental Ron and others have been to his career. It comes in Jay Kelly’s final sequence, where Jay watches a montage of his biggest hits. Baumbach uses Clooney’s real-life work for the montage, allowing him and the audience to reflect on what Clooney has given us as an actor. It’s one of the year’s savviest directorial choices. Not only does it evoke the most genuine reaction out of its leading man, but it also reminds us what movie stars offer when they’re the best version of themselves. While there are costs that should be taken into account, Jay Kelly is a compelling standard-bearer for the magic of movie stardom.