Venice: Noah Baumbach's Awards Hopeful "Jay Kelly"

by Elisa Giudici

George Clooney and Adam Sandler in "JAY KELLY" Photo by Peter Mountain © 2025 Netflix ,Inc

When Noah Baumbach presented White Noise on Netflix, expectations were sky-high: a star-studded cast, major ambitions, and the aura of a filmmaker fresh off Marriage Story. The film’s muted reception, however, seemed to threaten his trajectory, leaving a lingering sense of failure. Jay Kelly, his latest feature, feels like a response to that setback. Not so much a radical departure, but a project with a clearer aim: to offer George Clooney and Adam Sandler two roles carefully designed for visibility, prestige, and perhaps even awards...

The story revolves around Jay Kelly, an A-list actor played by Clooney in the now-familiar blend of fictional character and on-screen alter ego. Kelly has it all: global fame, charisma, a career celebrated with a Cary Grant–style allure. Yet he is also facing an identity crisis. His daughter refuses to spend the summer with him, a director who once launched his career dies unexpectedly, and an old friend from acting school reappears. Each of these episodes pushes him toward nostalgia and self-questioning, forcing him to confront whether the heroic image of Jay Kelly constructed and maintained for decades by Hollywood actually holds up in reality.

Baumbach captures this crisis through the machinery that sustains stardom: the agents, managers, and publicists who orbit around their client with a mix of loyalty, dependence, and exhaustion. Adam Sandler and Laura Dern, as Kelly’s agents, embody this world with a mix of compassion and weary professionalism. Their work isn’t just business; it’s a constant sacrifice of their own lives to preserve the career and public image of someone treated almost as a corporate brand. Sandler, in particular, brings a quiet desperation to his role, becoming the emotional center of the film and its most genuine point of connection.

Yet Jay Kelly never fully embraces the darker implications of its premise. Each time doubt is cast on the character—whether through his daughter’s confession of how damaging it was to watch him play a good father on screen, or in hints of compromises made on his way to stardom—the narrative quickly reassures us of his essential decency. Instead of a probing critique of Hollywood’s contradictions, the film leans toward a softer, self-consoling vision: Kelly is flawed, yes, but never malicious; absent, but still a “good man.” The result is more of a fable about stardom than an examination of its cost.

This tendency becomes most visible in the film’s Italian detour, where Baumbach indulges in a series of well-worn stereotypes; priests in cassocks, eccentric grandmothers, comic relief entrusted to Alba Rohrwacher. These scenes, though occasionally charming, add little beyond local color and dilute the sharper threads of the story. One wishes the narrative had stayed more tightly focused on Jay’s crisis and his relationships, where Baumbach’s writing occasionally finds its sharpness again, offering flashes of wit and emotional intensity.

Clooney, while never fully disappearing into the role, makes use of his familiar charm to anchor a character caught between vanity and vulnerability. And Sandler, who has long struggled with the perception of being a “comedian first,” finds in Roy a role carefully calibrated to show his range: empathetic, professional, even quietly heroic in his belief in cinema and friendship. It’s no coincidence that his awards campaign is already underway, with Clooney himself publicly endorsing his dramatic chops.

If Jay Kelly ultimately feels less incisive than Baumbach’s best work, it’s because it wants to be both critique and homage, satire and elegy, but never fully commits to any of them. Compared to Apple TV+’s The Studio, a series that tackles similar themes with more bite and elegance, Baumbach’s film seems gentler, more nostalgic, more willing to romanticize than to dissect. 

Previously at Venice