“It is a huge responsibility to be yourself. It is much easier to be someone else or nobody at all,” is a quote from the American writer Sylvia Plath preceding the tragicomic road movie “Jay Kelly”. This is followed by a rather atypically elaborate planning sequence on a film set for director Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story”): The camera hangs on the crane, follows different people and loses it again before she comes to a standstill in a real cinema picture-we see George Clooney dying in front of a sparing, noir-like big city silhouette with pistol on a lantern Leaning and reconciling a final monologue.
It is the final scene of the latest film by Jay Kelly, a still successful but unstoppable Hollywood star. After the last scene is in the box, the actor falls into a hole. While his estranged older daughter Jessica (Riley Keough), whom he once neglected in favor of his career, lives in another state, his younger daughter (Grace Edwards) wants to take a longer trip to Europe before moving out into college. And then Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), a director who once enables young Jay his first acting attempts and supported him as a kind of mentor.
Jay Kelly (George Clooney) is honored at a film festival – but in fact he is in a personal crisis and on a professional scabbard
At the funeral, he meets his former best friend Timothy (Billy Crudup), who used to have ambitions as an actor, but has now worked as a youth therapist. He spends on a speech with him on a few drinks-but what begins with menu as a method of menu as a methoding acting insert quickly takes a different course: Timothy accuses Jay of consciously brought him to have brought him to his career-and suggests drunk in his face. The confrontation with repressed parts of his past Jay falls into a crisis, and neither his constantly clearing friend and manager Ron (Adam Sandler) nor his PR consultant Liz (Laura Dern) can stop him from his plan overnight, to follow his daughter to Europe, where he should also be honored at a film festival …
Baumbach puts up several meanings of the train with which Kelly and Entourage travels: He not only rattles stops in France and Italy, but also various stations of Kelly's life, which are presented to us as always a little too fit to fitting to his situation. On the other hand, a world is supposed to compress in its compartments, to which the popular film star has had no access for decades. “How can I play people when I don't know people?” He asks himself.
Through the windows in the long -distance train between France and Italy, Kelly looks not only into the next compartment, but also into his own past.
Kelly enthusiastically contacts the fellow travelers confused by the presence of the cinema fields, with Baumbach flooding the wagon with light and always tailoring back and forth between Clooney's blissful smile and the “ordinary people” in the second class – a kitsch celebration of the down -to -earth and supposedly normal, which is otherwise more like with the background. Rich people's problems with films that work more frequently. And while one still hopes that Lars Eidinger, dressed in a cycling dress, may only be a well -placed running gag, this figure is also given an immediate function for Kelly's internal journey.
When it comes to the relationship between cinema and reality, which, as a thematic red thread through the tragic comedy stretched out thanks to numerous secondary locations, Baumbach comes too little illuminating knowledge – also because it believes a bit too much in the idea of authenticity, but mostly stilted his dialogues about the nature of art. In many places you think of films by Robert Altman (“The Player”), Preston Sturges (“Sullivans Travel”) or Federico Fellini (“8 ½”), but the “Frances Ha” director rarely reaches the effortlessness of his role models.
Thank God there are Adam Sandler
And yet “Jay Kelly” has a big plus: its line -up. Of course, on the one hand, George Clooney is in the title role, which also transports the charm and charisma of old Hollywood greats like Cary Grant even over 60 years. If Jay Kelly is described as the “last of the old film stars” in a scene, so of course his counterpart in real life is inevitably meant (Baumbach finally makes the boundaries between star and figure blurred in the final scene even more).
The film from Adam Sandler, with which Baumbach has previously worked for the “The Meyerowitz Stories”, which was also produced for Netflix, benefits the most. As in “You are not invited to my BAT-Mizwa” or finally “Happy Gilmore 2”, the comedian also gives family members like his daughters Sunny and Sadie Sandler as well as wife Jackie Sandler-and, for example, leads to the film, being seamlessly seamlessly in the film of relaxed sentimentality and mutual support “Jay Kelly”. Both the best punch lines and the most touching moments belong to his Ron, who refers to clients as “Puppy” and after decades of pastoral care for Jay.
Conclusion: After he has stood up with “white noise” on the film adaptation of a novel by Don Delillo, director Noah Baumbach again goes to the familiar terrain of a star-occupied ensemble comedy about neuroses, self-discovery and past work. The fact that the film succeeds despite some length and script weakness is mainly due to the grandiose interplay of George Clooney and Adam Sandler.
We saw “Jay Kelly” at the Venice Filmfest 2025, where he celebrated its world premiere as part of the official competition.