| Worth seeing: | as a charming study of middle-aged retrospection that doesn't really add anything to our understanding of humanity - or celebrity |
| Director: | Noah Baumbach |
| Featuring: | George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Alex Jarrett, Billy Crudup, Chloë Sevigny, Emily Mortimer, Eve Hewson, Grace Edwards, Greta Gerwig, Isla Fisher, Jamie Demetriou, Jim Broadbent, Laura Dern, Lenny Henry, Patrick Wilson, Patsy Ferran, Riley Keough, Sadie Sandler, Stacey Keach |
| Length: | 132 minutes |
| Certificate: | 15 |
| Country: | Italy, UK, US |
| Released: | 14th November 2025, now showing on Netflix |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Jay Kelly (George Clooney) is one of Hollywood’s biggest stars – in the twilight of a hugely successful career. He’s loved by the public but feels too important for such adulation – he won’t even attend festivals that want to honour his work.
But suddenly, after many decades in the limelight, he’s considering the consequences of his celebrity and how he got there.
He feels bad when he finds out that the director who made his career (Jim Broadbent) has just died, without him having made up for declining to help him with his final project. And an encounter with a former acting classmate (Billy Crudup) at the funeral puts some distant memories into perspective, making him question the balance between ambition and loyalty.
His eldest daughter Jessica (Riley Keough) has long since given up on him being a reliable father – and so as not to repeat the same mistake, when his younger daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) tells him she’s planning to spend her last summer before university travelling around Europe with her friends, he decides to walk out on his next film to follow her.
His entire entourage – led by his manager Ron (Adam Sandler) and publicist Liz (Laura Dern) – drop everything and everyone in their own lives to follow him around the world.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
It doesn’t get much more meta than this; one of the world’s biggest film stars, playing one of the world’s biggest film stars. One extra even tells Jay Kelly he just plays himself all the time, to which he replies that it’s harder to play yourself than to play someone else. In this film, in many ways, Clooney is, of course, playing himself.
It’s always interesting to have a peek behind the curtains of Hollywood and you would assume that with stars like this working for the director Noah Baumbach, there’d be a degree of authenticity to the relationships between star and his entourage and fans.
Driven by an uncomfortably dramatic experience with his former acting classmate, Jay Kelly is pushed belatedly into a journey of self-discovery, but whether it’s because we all have similar experiences or at the very least, periods of self-doubt, it’s by turns over familiar, unoriginal and – when it tries to be a little different – lacking in credibility.
Questioning whether you were right to put career before children – many of us will have had that debate ourselves or with those we love – likewise, wondering whether you put your own progress before that of a friend – or whether you put your boss before your family (either through an undeserved sense of loyalty or a desire to progress) – these are questions that are not even specific to the film business – and if we haven’t had them ourselves, we’ll have seen them in many a film and this has nothing new to add – other than, perhaps, just humanising a celebrity by showing us that Hollywood superstars aren’t really that different from anyone else.
But this film doesn’t consider the other oft-asked question of putting your job before your relationship – and indeed, there’s not even a reference to a mother who might have picked up the slack while he was building his career and is, consequently, more worthy of the love of their daughters.
And when they try push the narrative a little further, it feels more like farce than reality – from the big star charming random passengers from all nationalities in the 2nd class carriage of a Tuscan train to having him turn into the kind of hero he portrays, as he chases a much younger thief across a field.
And the denouement – a somewhat mawkish tribute to Jay Kelly’s career – using clips, of course, from Clooney’s own – seems to be there largely to set up the final line of the film, which I won’t spoil for you – suffice to say that it’s a reprise of something you’ll already have heard, earlier in the film.
So – can it ever be too late to make up for decisions you’ve made in the past? The answer, of course, is that it depends – which doesn’t make for a particularly satisfying conclusion.
Perhaps the one directorial flourish which makes this stand out from others is the way Baumbach portrays Jay Kelly’s memories – flashbacks with a younger actor, yes, but Clooney is standing there watching his own past; it doesn’t add anything narratively, although it adds a fragment of freshness and gives a sense of what he thinks about his memories.
Jay Kelly, the film, is as warm, charming,affable – and shallow – as Jay Kelly the star – or at least his on-screen persona – but coming from such a remarkable collection of film professionals, with Adam Sandler delivering another top-rate dramatic turn, it’s surprisingly unambitious and doesn’t really try to show us anything we’ve never seen before, either in terms of human relationships – or the behind-the-scenes of the world of entertainment.