Jay Kelly (2025) dir. Noah Baumbach

Despite impressive performances by Adam Sandler and George Clooney, Jay Kelly suffers from a crisis of identity, not unlike the main character.

In one scene in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly (2025), the eponymous movie star is dancing in a room full of people celebrating his legacy and presence at a film festival in Italy. The bass is thumping, people are cheering, and Jay Kelly is in the center of it all. But he’s not happy. He’s somewhere else.

When I think of Noah Baumbach, I think of Marriage Story (2019) and The Meyerowitz Stories (2017). Granted, those are the only other films of his I’ve seen, but they still resonant with me because of how down-to-earth they are. They’re not grandiose stories trying to impress the most prestigious critics, or the eclectic arthouse films that might be more inaccessible to mainstream audiences. They’re just stories about people being flawed, and navigating complex issues in their own flawed ways. Jay Kelly tries to do the same, but in a…let’s say more claustrophobic way.

To be clear, the pacing and characters work really well. The film is basically a road movie, where Jay Kelly and his dwindling entourage make their way across Europe to reach a film festival where’s he’s being honored. However, after an incident back home, Kelly is running both from and to multiple things in his personal life. Not only did he have a turbulent run in with an old friend, but his relationship with his adult daughters have strained considerably. The closest thing he has to a loved one is his manager Ron, with them having enough connection to qualify for the most homoerotic relationship in 2025 cinema.

You immediately clock who most of the characters are. Jay Kelly is essentially the baby whom everyone must protect and support throughout every whim he gets involved in, whether it’s impulsively getting on a train to Italy, bonding with his daughter, or chasing after a purse-snatcher in the countryside. Ron, the manager played by Adam Sandler, is warm and friendly, but he’s also having trouble balancing his personal life with the hectic work relationship he has with Kelly. Liz, Kelly’s publicist, is slightly less immune to his antics, but still has compassion for Ron. It’s all one dysfunctional family, with Jay Kelly at the center of it all.

But it can be hard to determine the method behind the madness of Jay Kelly. There’s a lot going on with him, whether it’s his problematic parenting style with his daughters, his weird relationship with his dad, his purgatorial movie career, or his broader legacy as a movie star that has direct parallels to Clooney’s. But the screenplay main point about how Jay Kelly is so self-languishing and self-destructive can wear down on the viewer.

There’s one particular scene where this becomes immediately apparent. Later in the film, Jay Kelly is running through a fog-shrouded forest, wearing a white linen suit. A scene unfolds, at which point his suit gets dirtier and dirtier, until his stardom-encrusted persona has all but shattered. As powerful as it is to see a man so powerful alone at the top, there’s always this translucent sheen upon him. We can get to know him, but the line between him being himself and him being “himself” is always thick.

Which might be the point. We don’t need to have a singular Freudian event to explain an entire man’s psychology. George Clooney does a great job at portraying Kelly’s flaws and hypocrisies, from one set piece to another. However, things got a little better for me once Adam Sandler’s Ron returned. His charisma and unexpected moments of humor carried me through the film’s more awkward moments, and it made the final moments of the film work for me. Not to mention it’s just nice having in a comedic film that’s not Adam Sandler making a complete jackass of himself.

So all in all, this is a film about a movie star. It’s about the perils of stardom, and it’s about the price of fame. It’s about fatherhood, being an actor, and the struggles of maintaining friendships in the middle part of your life. But it’s not certain where it stands.

FURTHER THOUGHTS

• Noah Baumbach has a cameo in this.
• From now on, I will be incorporating a Sharpie into my makeup routine. Which will be hard, because I don’t have one.
• I don’t ever want to be famous if it means you can’t go on cross-country train trips.