In the same year that Apple TV’s series The Studio (2025) took a scalpel to modern-day Hollywood – a Hollywood beset by pandemics, wildfires, union action, sparring tech barons, punitive politicians, and the creeping, existential threat of artificial intelligence – here comes Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, along with its hero Jay Kelly (George Clooney). Both film and protagonist are handsome, genial, and seemingly apolitical – throwbacks to a different, simpler, no doubt more naïve time.

Ever since he sauntered onto our TV screens in ER, Clooney has been painted as the last in a long line of great leading men à la Brando and Cooper and Gable and Grant, even when his filmography has failed to live up to the same calibre. He has since embraced the role of a man out of time, a silver fox sipping Nespresso on his Lake Como balcony, while his own directorial efforts have been blinkered by a slavish devotion to mid-century American nostalgia.

Both narratively and stylistically, Jay Kelly is built around this anachronistic affect. A 2025 movie starring a 1990s heartthrob in the mould of 1950s matinee idols, Jay Kelly presents values that, much like its leading man’s looks, have been vacuum-sealed for freshness, rendering them archaic yet comforting. Miraculously, both the movie and the man manage to skate by, in large part, on the strength of their charms.

After the death of a mentor and a fraught post-funeral encounter with an envious old acting school classmate (an unforgettable Billy Crudup, eerily believable as a Clooney could-have-been), Jay Kelly finds himself plagued by regrets. Despite thirty-plus years of international fame and untold wealth, he has begun to wonder about the sum total of his life, given that, as he puts it, ‘all [his] memories are movies’. (Cue Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is?’)

If only we all had the means to experience a spiritual crisis, Jay Kelly style. Despite being one week out from shooting a new film, Jay packs his bags and embarks via private jet on an unscheduled European sojourn, much to the dismay of the small army whose own livelihoods depend on keeping Jay Kelly Industries afloat. This includes his manager Ron (Adam Sandler), his publicist Liz (Laura Dern), his stylist Candy (Emily Mortimer, also Baumbach’s co-writer), and many more, all of whom are oxpecker birds to Jay’s benevolent hippopotamus. His pretence for the trip is an impromptu rendezvous with his teenage daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards), currently jaunting through France with her very normal, non-famous friends, and not the least bit pleased to have her Dior-ambassador father gatecrashing their backpacking holiday.

George Clooney as Jay Kelly and Adam Sandler as Ron Sukenick in Jay Kelly (courtesy of Netflix)

In a genius bit of ego-stroking, Ron arranges for Jay to accept a career tribute award at a festival in Tuscany and, with that, the entourage is off – first to Paris, then on a commuter train to Italy, where Jay finds himself rubbing shoulders with common folk for the first time in decades. Here, Baumbach returns to the broad farcical stylings he experimented with in the criminally underrated Mistress America (2015), and many of the film’s strongest comedic moments stem from the amicable yet utterly useless Jay – ‘a cocker spaniel in the Serengeti’ – pinballing between sweaty train carriages with his management team in hot pursuit.

Elsewhere, though, Jay Kelly is hobbled by the sheer eye-rolling bluntness of Baumbach and Mortimer’s script. Even when it’s not getting bogged down in scenes of literal family therapy, characters speak to each other via psychoanalytical soundbites: ‘Are you running to something or from something?’, ‘Do you know how hard it is to be yourself?’, ‘How can I play people when I don’t see people?’ This is all the more frustrating given that, in other moments, the film proves itself capable of immense (and wordless) grace.

Consider the split second when Jay watches his teenage daughter’s new boyfriend stroke her hand with his fingers; in Jay’s expression, there is a yearning for that same youthful passion, as well as a bittersweet acceptance of his daughter growing up. Everything we need to know about Jay Kelly is cleverly buried, but perfectly decipherable, in Clooney’s winsome, knowing face. The last thing we need is a stranger on a train asking him point blank: ‘Do you have any regrets?’

Remarkably, many of the film’s more successful emotional volleys come courtesy of Adam Sandler, whose occasional Oscar-worthy performances (Punch-Drunk Love [2002], Uncut Gems [2019]) play cleverly against his more widely known Happy Gilmore persona. Clooney’s turn, by contrast, is a one-to-one transposition; it relies entirely on the viewing public’s familiarity with him and his back catalogue. When a highlight reel screens at the tribute ceremony in Tuscany, Jay Kelly’s films are all George Clooney films (notably absent: Batman & Robin [1997]).

But there’s really no faulting Clooney for doing what he does best, especially when age has only added even richer timbres to his voice and an even sadder sparkle to his eye. It helps that he and Sandler are buoyed along by one of the finest supporting casts in recent memory – not just Dern, but Riley Keough, Greta Gerwig, Jim Broadbent, Patrick Wilson, and a hilarious Alba Rohrwacher. Linus Sandgren’s impeccable cinematography contends that not all Netflix films are doomed to the same motion-smoothed flatness, and Nicholas Britell’s mesmeric score carries us confidently through the schmaltz.

One of Baumbach and Mortimer’s more interesting choices is to make Jay Kelly an ostensibly decent guy – by celebrity standards, at least. He is no prima donna (knee-jerk trips to Europe notwithstanding). He is beloved by film crews and fans alike. There is no indication that his fame has ever led to abuse or addiction. His fundamental flaw is that he values his work above all else. In our first and last moments with Jay, we see him asking, almost begging, a director for another take: ‘I’d like another.’ Wouldn’t we all?

Like All That Jazz (1979), Birdman (2014), and The Great Beauty (2013), Jay Kelly is a movie about roads already taken and costs already sunk. And, like those films, it hearkens back to a time when all that stood between a man and eternity was successful self-actualisation. This is an outdated idea, but it is certainly a nice one, and it cements Jay Kelly as both a movie – and a man – out of time.