How does one define success? Not only is this a deeply personal question, it shifts and changes based on age and experience (to name a few factors). My children would define success as unlimited game time and Halloween candy with each meal, always. At their age, I would’ve settled for a day without being bullied. In my 20s and 30s, success was measured by professional accomplishments — earning a Masters and seeking full-time work. Now, however, being present and available for my children, being connected to them (not how much I write or achieve) is what keeps me awake each night as I replay the day. Though the backdrop is the film industry with a megastar up front, this seems to be the focal point for the new Noah Baumbach-directed project, Jay Kelly, co-written by Baumbach (Marriage Story; Fantastic Mr. Fox) and actor Emily Mortimer (Formula 51; The Newsroom), a dramedy that mixes the satirical industry insider aspects of The Player (1992) with the sincerity and heart of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and the contemplation of A Christmas Carol to posit what makes life a success and why using the single take we get in this world makes it more precious than anything.
George Clooney as Jay Kelly in JAY KELLY. Photo Credit: Peter Mountain/Netflix. Photo courtesy of Netflix. © Netflix, Inc.
Having wrapped his latest picture, actor Jay Kelly (George Clooney), though melancholic for the end of the project, is excited at the prospect of spending some time with younger daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) before she leaves to start college on the East Coast. However, between learning of the death of an old friend and that Daisy is leaving for her summer trip to Europe sooner than expected, he up ends his plans to follow her, causing a great deal of chaos in the process for his devoted manager Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler), who’s promised that Jay will be on-set for a new project soon. But Jay doesn’t care about any of this as his quest to connect with Daisy and the loss of his friend force Jay to explore his life — all the failures, all the successes — in his pursuit of professional greatness.
L-R: Billy Crudup as Timothy and George Clooney as Jay Kelly in JAY KELLY. Photo Credit: Wilson Webb/Netflix. Photo courtesy of Netflix. © Netflix, Inc.
The opening of any film sets the tone for what follows and Baumbach understands this better than anyone. Beginning with smoke that obfuscates (at first) a quote in black lettering before revealing that we’re on a film set right as they prepare for one last take. The quote, having been seen by us, is replaced with a long take as cast members of Jay Kelly (called “The Players” in the credits) move in and out of center frame, their dialogue growing louder and fainter as folks move around the frame. This sequence helps audiences less familiar with moviemaking to get a sense of the chaos that occurs before a director calls “action,” but, more importantly, to show just how surrounded by people Jay Kelly is while establishing a play-like feeling where noises and actions occur over top everything else, just as in reality. The responsibility of his performance may lie on his shoulders, his ability to provide the performance his director wants and that meets his standards up to him alone, but he is, nevertheless, not alone. This is a joke that frequents the film (and appears in the trailer), usually by daughter Daisy, as she tells her father that he’s never alone, at which point his bodyguard hands him a beverage. Between the opening sequence and this joke, Baumbach sets the stage for a character-driven piece in which what the public sees and what the individual experiences are often two different realities. These realities, especially as they collide (literally and figuratively), are the center-piece of the film, bringing forth a notion by Baumbach and Mortimer in which a question forms about who Jay Kelly is versus who he thinks he is; a question that can only be answered if one strips him of all he has in order to reveal what he wants. Through that vulnerability, discovery does occur, creating an opportunity to journey not just through one man’s life but the ways in which his has touched others, for good or for ill. Here, Jay Kelly focuses on colleagues, friends, family – the relationships we form and the way we use them, cultivate them, or allow them to wither and what this says about ourselves and our lived experience.
L-R: Greta Gerwig as Lois Sukenick and Adam Sandler as Ron Sukenick in JAY KELLY. Photo Credit: Netflix. Photo courtesy of Netflix. © Netflix, Inc.
There are two things Baumbach capitalizes on brilliantly to accomplish the exploration of the lived experience: the use of production design and the casting of Clooney. Much like the opening sequence establishes the play-like setting of the film, Baumbach utilizes movie magic for flashbacks, such as showing Jay opening a door on a train car as if to move to another car and, instead, finds himself on a set from his early years. There, like his own Ghost of Christmas Past, he watches a moment in his life play out, monologuing briefly about its meaning to him, providing color to several of his relationships in the process. It’s not uncommon for films about growing older to wax poetic about regrets and to use flashbacks as a means of showing the audience instead of telling us who they were back then, but this choice incorporates the visual language of cinema, turning the traditional into magic the way only show business can. Just as Jay feels surprised and somewhat reluctant to re-experience a memory that is a terrible intrusive thought, so does the audience feel, at least at first, confused and uncertain at what we should feel. Yet, the longer we spend time with Jay, the more we begin to see the parts of Jay that the Movie Star replaced. This is where casting Clooney is the second best as the actor, who has credits dating back to 1978 with turns on several tv shows, tv movies, and features, but who didn’t really land with audiences until NBC’s medical drama ER debuted in 1994. Exuding a classic Hollywood charm, Clooney has appeared in comedies, romances, dramas, thrillers, horror, and everything in between, entertaining audiences by seemingly never taking himself or his status altogether too seriously. You need an actor like this — one who feels as prolific as Jay Kelly, one who audiences feel connected to through their work, and one who’s willing to strip themselves (in this case metaphorically) — to convincingly make the point that spending your life pretending may create a world in which little feels real. This, of course, goes back to the initial conceit of the film and that opening, that Jay is never alone and, by creating circumstances in which that’s the end result of all he’s done, the audience, too, through the comfort of Clooney, can reorganize how they view the relationships they, too, possess and the ones they’ve let fall by the wayside in pursuit of one’s goals.
L-R: George Clooney as Jay Kelly and Riley Keough as Jessica in JAY KELLY. Photo Credit: Peter Mountain/Netflix. Photo courtesy of Netflix. © Netflix, Inc.
The link between Jay Kelly and the audience rests in the hands of the performances from the cast. We, like the fictional audience represented by the plebs Jay comes across, tend to look at Clooney with rose-colored glasses, so it requires a deftness to remove the glossy sheen to examine what remains. With each memory that Jay experiences, staged like an audience member himself, and with each interaction with someone he believes matters to him, Clooney manages to shed more and more of the Hollywood veneer until we’re left with just a man in possession of the terrible realization that the only next take comes in the next life. Balanced and supported by Adam Sandler (Punch-Drunk Love; Hustle), Riley Keough (Mad Max: Fury Road; Logan Lucky), Grace Edwards (Asteroid City), Laura Dern (Little Women; Star Wars: The Last Jedi), Stacy Keach (Batman: Mask of the Phantasm), Jim Broadbent (Paddington), Patrick Wilson (Watchmen), and others, Clooney is given the space so that Jay can be cornered by the reality he’s so desperately fought to resist and yet must confront. Amid so many great performers, it’s Sandler and Keach who stand out the most, even if Keough’s two brief sequences are powerfully heartbreaking in their use of imaginative execution as they represent two stalwart pieces of Jay’s life: the manager who’s been with him forever and the father who doesn’t get what he does. For the former, Sandler is allowed the space to exist within the quiet moments so that the unsaid speaks louder than what is. Sandler makes Ron not just a rock to be leaned on, but the exact one that gets taken for granted, even with reasonable boundaries set and expressed. Keach makes the expected friction between father and son somewhat affable while allowing for the frustration and resentment to come through as a parent who does not seek to invest in his child’s dreams. For a film about a man who only seems to know himself as an actor playing other parts, what part can he play that would make his father love and support him? What can he do to retain the support of the friend to whom he routinely pays 15% of each deal made? The script, written by two individuals well-traveled in the film industry, doesn’t manufacture drama for the sake of a moment and the performances within them don’t drip with insincerity or false flattery.
George Clooney as Jay Kelly in JAY KELLY. Photo Credit: Peter Mountain/Netflix. Photo courtesy of Netflix. © Netflix, Inc.
Perhaps because of my own awareness, but the facts that Baumbach’s wife and filmmaker/actor/Oscar nominee Greta Gerwig (Barbie; Little Women; Lady Bird) portrays Ron’s wife, that one of Sandler’s daughters plays Ron’s daughter, that Mortimer herself portrays hair and makeup artist Candy, as well as a whole host of other friends, relatives, and former cast and crew are a part of this project make the themes within it regarding the work that filmmakers conceive of which is adored by the world might also be a source of massive resentment if not balanced appropriately. It’s as though Baumbach is answering the very question he and Mortimer place at the heart of the film, an intentional easter egg for the well-versed in cinema and a way to demonstrate that some projects are made better by working with those you love.
George Clooney as Jay Kelly in JAY KELLY. Photo Credit: Netflix. Photo courtesy of Netflix. © Netflix, Inc.
Of his recent projects, Jay Kelly is perhaps Baumbach’s most accessible. Not in the sense that it’s in select theaters before landing on Netflix (this occurred with past projects White Noise (2022) and Marriage Story (2019), as well), but that it’s something just about anyone can understand and relate to. In fact, the perspective one brings based on their at-present experiences will undoubtedly shade their reaction as there’s plenty of reasons to see Jay as tragic, as redemptive, as destructive, as victim, and as hero based entirely on where you are in the complex web of interaction we call the human existence. That Baumbach and Mortimer’s script is executed like a play and less like a film, with the world populated by people conversing, living, and moving around, it just goes to demonstrate just how isolated Jay is (even at the center of a large group), illustrating all the more profoundly why what matters are the people we collect from the start of our lives to the end. There are no second takes. Every choice should be made in the moment; each one recognized for the weight it carries. We’re all method here. Anything else is bullshit and can’t be fixed in post.
In select theaters November 14th, 2025.
In wider release November 21st, 2025.
Available on Netflix December 5th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Netflix Jay Kelly webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews, streaming
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