Clooney’s Best Role in Years—and Baumbach’s Boldest Film Yet

By Laurence Lerman / New York City

George Clooney takes the train to Tuscany in Jay Kelly

SCREEN TIME

There’s a line in Noah Baumbach’s new comedy-drama Jay Kelly where George Clooney, playing the titular aging movie star, mutters, “I’m getting tired of being the guy everyone still expects to be 35.” It lands like both a sigh and a confession—and also like a sly wink from Baumbach himself, who’s grown up on-screen through the characters he’s written. Once the wunderkind of New York neuroticism (The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha), the 56-year-old Baumbach is now a filmmaker in full command of scale, tone and, in Jay Kelly, one of the starriest ensembles he’s directed since 2017’s The Meyrowitz Chronicles.

Actor Jay Kelly (Clooney) is just wrapping up his latest film. Next up for the global box-office icon in the twilight of his career is a trip to Europe, but not for a press tour. Rather, he’s zipping overseas to shadow his youngest daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), and spend at least a week or two with her during a pre-college trip abroad. Ron, Jay’s long-suffering manager (Adam Sandler) who’s built his life around keeping Jay employable and upright, goes along to keep the star from detonating his next gig.

To keep the tabloids and financiers calm, Jay’s years-long flack Liz (Laura Dern) and Ron float a neat cover story: Jay’s popping over to France in his capacity as a Dior brand ambassador, then down to Tuscany to receive a career “tribute.” The real itinerary is messier—trains, detours, awkward reunions—but the pursuit is pure: a father chasing time he’s squandered, a manager guarding a client who’s also his most complicated friend, and a publicist who harbors complicated feelings about them both.

Adam Sandler and Clooney dress up for the movies

That looseness of purpose is what makes Jay Kelly such a surprise. Baumbach, who has been generally known for his determined precision (the bulk of his screenwork is meticulously scripted and rehearsed), seems quite at ease letting this movie breathe. He gives Clooney and Sandler space to riff, to interrupt, to let silence hang. The result feels lived-in yet unmistakably authored. The dialogue still sparkles—Emily Mortimer cowrote the script--but it’s less mannered; its emotional beats landing softly, like waves instead of hammer blows.

Clooney, whose own career has danced between suave self-awareness and existential fatigue, gives his best performance in years. There’s a deep sadness in his eyes as Jay navigates adoration that no longer feels nourishing. Sandler continues to tap into his late-career acting strengths, grounding the movie with a performance that’s funny, gruff, and tender. Together, they have the chemistry of two men bound by shared weariness—affectionate duels of ego and empathy. And Dern, juggling spin control and sympathy, injects a note of wry realism that keeps the men honest. Also on board is Billy Crudup, who appears as a slick streaming company executive, while cameos by Baumbach regulars Greta Gerwig and Ben Stiller add texture without indulgence.

Clooney and Riley Keough try to figure things out

Visually, Jay Kelly is Baumbach’s most cosmopolitan film. Shot across four continents, it luxuriates in hotel corridors, train stations, and rooftop bars, creating a portrait of celebrity as both globalized and claustrophobic. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan gives the movie a lush, nostalgic sheen—soft golds, muted blues, the color of old movie posters left too long in the sun. Structurally, the film moves like memory, with scenes bleeding into one another and timelines seeming to blur. At times, the film feels like 8½ reimagined for the streaming era—a fantasia of regret and reinvention as filtered through Baumbach’s sly eye. He’s long been fascinated by artists and intellectuals in crisis; here his protagonist isn’t a stand-in for anxiety but an emblem of maturity. Baumbach understands Jay’s narcissism and Ron’s loyalty and presents their codependence as both beautiful and suffocating.

Most striking is Baumbach’s ease with big stars. Working with Clooney, Sandler, Dern, and half a dozen marquee names could have tipped Jay Kelly into vanity-project territory, yet Baumbach corrals them with the same light touch he used on Dustin Hoffman  and Emma Thompson in Meyrowitz and, more recently, Scarlet Johansson and Adam Driver in Marriage Story. His direction feels like jazz—guiding the melody but letting the players solo. You sense the trust on set, the pleasure of collaboration. Baumbach, often considered a poet of urban angst, here genuinely seems to enjoy the company of others.

Clooney meets his adoring public

By the end, as Jay gazes out from a balcony over yet another skyline, you realize Baumbach has made not just a story about fame and friendship but a self-portrait of creative evolution. Jay Kelly may not be perfect—it sags slightly in the middle, and a few subplots feel undercooked—but it’s a generous, confident work from a director who’s grown beyond the neuroses that filled his earlier movies. This one is all about what happens when you stop running after a life of success and start wondering what comes after it.

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Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication—and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.