Jay Kelly is a Netflix movie night you can skip

The cult of the movie star has taken a battering in the TikTok era.

In a 2024 interview, Natalie Portman made the point that her son could name more famous YouTubers than famous movie stars.

Stars like George Clooney are potentially the last of their kind, which makes the release of Jay Kelly that bit more interesting.

Depending on your age, Clooney is either the guy who successfully launched a career off the back of ER to become an iconic movie star or the guy with the high-profile marriage to a human rights lawyer who does coffee ads and occasionally wades into politics.

Jay Kelly, Netflix’s big Oscar shot this year, sees auteur Noah Baumbach explore the cult and psychology of celebrity, to dour results.

Clooney stars as the titular character, in what is a paper-thin stand-in for the real Clooney; a star who is reflecting on his career while attempting to juggle family commitments.

The thesis of the film appears to be the famous Cary Grant quote about not knowing himself.

The thespian was once quoted as saying, “everyone wants to be Cary Grant – even I want to be Cary Grant,” and that’s a solid idea to base a movie around.

In this instance, it fails to even crack the surface of why we project ourselves onto celebrities.

There have been many great movies about movies over the years – Babylon is a fantastic recent example, historic examples like Ed Wood, Day For Night, Boogie Nights are standouts – but this is Jay Kelly’s fatal flaw; it has nothing to say about film itself, nor does it offer any insight into the psychology of celebrities. 

Clooney wrestles with his legacy as both a star and a father, and it has nothing new or interesting to say on either front.

Even if the film starred another big star in the lead role (maybe a Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks) and it had the meta-textual element removed, it would still be a damp squib.

The plot involves Clooney travelling to Italy to accept an award at a film festival, and on his way there, he revisits key moments in his life that have led to this moment.

Before we spend the rest of the review calling Jay Kelly an inept, sloppy film, some praise is due for the film’s cast.

Of course, George Clooney is as effortlessly charming as always (there’s a reason he’s your aunt’s favourite actor), and Adam Sandler shows his dramatic chops for once.

Sandler has done great work with Baumbach in the past (2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories was a rare bright spot in the era where he only made Netflix comedy slop for idiots), and Sandler sinks his teeth into the script here.

Sandler’s dramatic performances in films like Punch-Drunk Love, Uncut Gems and Hustle reveal that, aside from the fart jokes and playing the same guy in every movie, there is a genuinely great actor in there somewhere.

Sandler is the heart of Jay Kelly, playing the stars’ long-time agent and is the audience surrogate.

The Sandman is Clooney’s right-hand man and gets him out of various scrapes, the normal man in the presence of a world-famous icon.

Laura Dern, who won her Oscar for her role in Baumbach’s 2019 film Marriage Story, is also a welcome presence to the cast, even if the script forgets to give her something to do.

When the film explores what it’s like to be the person booking the trains or organising the hotel for a superstar, it brushes up against the idea of being interesting, then Baumbach decides it’s time for another flashback that’s meant to make us care about how hard it is to be rich and famous.

Yes, we know being a globetrotting movie star is hard, yes, we know some people have to put career over family, but this film is nothing you haven’t seen before.

Not every film has to be an earth-shattering insight into the human condition, but you’d expect better from Baumbach; if a student turned in this script, the lecturer would fail them.

Baumbach has had some real career highs (the Barbie screenplay, Frances Ha, his documentary on Brian De Palma), so when he turns in a bad movie like this, it makes it a more bitter pill to swallow.

The basic premise of the film should lend itself to a plot like The Trip.

In The Trip, the setting is nearly incidental and you want to spend time with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as they swap stories, impressions, jokes and discuss life stuff.

With Jay Kelly, it’s like being trapped in a room with someone showing you a slideshow of a boring holiday they went on.

We’re sure the film was nice to film, the cast and crew had a nice trip to Italy, but that doesn’t mean it should be our problem.

If Jay Kelly bounces off film fans, then are John and Jane Public going to care about George Clooney’s hagiography?

What’s interesting about Jay Kelly is that the film is clearly Baumbach going for a more commercial play after 2022’s White Noise.

While White Noise was a great film that somehow managed to adapt an unadaptable novel, it was also watched by roughly 37 people and enjoyed by even fewer than that.

You can understand the instinct of going for a “safer” project like Jay Kelly; this film can actually be marketed because it’s about George Clooney and Adam Sandler palling around in Italy, you can sell that film on Graham Norton or in a New Yorker interview.

The problem is, Baumbach has failed to communicate why you should care about the titular character.

By the third or fourth flashback to Jay Kelly’s past and him looking back at his own life and career like Scrooge, you get the idea, and patience starts to wear thin.

As mentioned, this is being marketed as a film for film lovers, and yet it doesn’t quite know what version of the industry it wants to present.

It tries to present both a mean-spirited and a Fellini-esque vision of Hollywood, and ultimately splits the difference by being about nothing at all.

Babylon and The Fabelmans walked a very fine line between promoting the power and magic of cinema as an art form; Jay Kelly has no such insight.

Jay Kelly reveals Baumbach’s worst qualities as a filmmaker; he hits the same beats time and time again to diminishing returns and makes the fatal error of thinking audiences care about his relationship with his own father.

Plenty of other good directors have gotten great mileage out of their daddy issues – Steven Spielberg, for one – but like a typical therapy session, this one should have stayed between the doctor and patient.