Jay Kelly (American premiere, in person: Noah Baumbach, Laura Dern, Adam Sandler)

Noah Baumbach: Jay Kelly (IT/GB/US 2025) starring George Clooney.

Larry Gross (TFF 2025): "When Jay Kelly (George Clooney), a past-his-prime movie star, attends the funeral of a friend (Jim Broadbent), he starts a fistfight with a rival (Billy Crudup) and thus triggers a personal crisis. Soon, Jay has embarked on a deep, funny and late-in-the-game quest to better know his emotional and psychic world (which, hitherto, he’s fastidiously avoided). In Noah Baumbach’s painfully funny journey of memory and discovery, Clooney is effortlessly commanding as he captures Jay’s insecurity and self-absorption. Adam Sandler, as Jay’s long-suffering manager, gives a fine performance, as does the stellar supporting cast: Laura Dern, Riley Keough, Grace Edwards, Emily Mortimer, Patrick Wilson, Greta Gerwig, Alba Rohrwacher, Stacy Keach and Lars Eidinger. Baumbach wrote his emotionally layered and deeply affecting film with Mortimer, and it joins the list of supreme films about the psyche of the motion picture world, along with Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Woody Allen’s STARDUST MEMORIES." –LG (Italy/U.K./U.S., 2025, 132m) In person: Noah Baumbach, Nicholas Britell, George Clooney, Billy Crudup, Laura Dern, Adam Sandler, Patrick Wilson

    Viewed at Chuck Jones's Cinema, Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 31 Aug 2025

"It is a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all" - Sylvia Plath (motto of the film)

AA: Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly is a high profile Hollywood self-reflection about film stardom. It is about the greatest questions: balancing career and family - career and friends - career and colleagues. George Clooney radiates classic film star charisma. He is also genuinely vulnerable in exposing the vanity of his character. The movie is a journey that starts in California and leads via Paris to Tuscany. The Italian connection evokes Marcello Mastroianni and his combination of glamour and self-deprecation.

It is a journey of self-discovery for Jay Kelly. He has passed his best before date. His younger daughter is leaving home to a grand tour of Europe, and Jay decides to follow her, against her wishes, almost stalking her. His daughters are vocal in their assessment. "Dad was never there". "You didn't spend time with me". Their crucial period of growing up is over, and Jay is irrevocably estranged from his children. He does not even know them.

The film starts at a funeral of a colleague, where Jay meets an old friend from the theatre school. They used to be best friends, but a meeting at a bar leads to a fistfight. Jay Kelly has an entourage of trusted colleagues (Adam Sandler, Laura Dern), but he insults and hurts them, and they are leaving him.

The memory journey of bitter self-reflection is a concept familiar from Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. At the private jet, the bullet train and walking through the Tuscany landscape, Baumbach inserts dream and memory flashbacks from Kelly's past. Jay is forced to introspection, confronting his inner emptiness. "Who am I? An American dream". His plastic smile and made-up face have become substitutes for identity.

But during the journey Jay Kelly also experiences the true blessing of movie stardom. He brings joy to people. The train passengers are genuinely enthusiastic to meet the movie star in person. And Kelly is grateful for meeting real people at last. At this turn, Baumbach enters the make-believe territory of a Hollywood musical. When an old lady's handbag is stolen and the thief runs away from the train, Kelly chases and catches him, but he also realizes that the man has mental problems and needs help. Kelly becomes a real star for the train passengers. 

The climax is a tribute to Kelly at an Italian film festival. Baumbach handles this in a mode of condescending parody and portrays the film festival activists in crude caricature. This is the film's  weakness, as well as the tired running joke with the cheesecake.