Jay Kelly: a breezily watchable but anodyne tribute to George Clooney’s stardom

“You’re the American Dream, the last of the old movie stars.” So says Jay Kelly’s manager (Adam Sandler) to veteran leading man Jay Kelly (George Clooney), as well he might, toward the end of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, a long, indulgent and rather starry-eyed tribute to the general rosy glow of Hollywood celebrity. More specifically, it’s a tribute to the celebrity of Clooney, here such a close analogue for his onscreen character that, when it comes time for a climactic clip reel of Kelly’s greatest screen hits, it’s Clooney’s that play out instead, from artistic highs (The Thin Red Line and Out of Sight, both 1998) to little-known lows (the 1986 TV movie Combat Academy). Minutes of watching his professional life passing before his eyes on screen leaves Kelly/Clooney moist-eyed, and the lush swells of Nicholas Britell’s score suggest we’re supposed to be similarly moved.

But Jay Kelly isn’t George Clooney, and even if he were, there’s not a whole lot here to cry for. Baumbach’s film trades in lonely-at-the-top clichés that have been a fixture of film industry self-portraiture since What Price Hollywood? (1932): twice-divorced Kelly has the unquestioning adoration of millions of fans, but not of a good woman or his two grown daughters, who regard him with either gentle contempt or outright resentment. His friends are his staff, though his staff are not necessarily his friends. On the plus side, he has a Beverly Hills ranch house, his own hair and blindingly capped teeth, millions of dollars to cushion any blow to his calloused heart, and an arts festival in Tuscany offering to fly him out for a cushy tribute – the crucial event of this lolloping, low-stakes narrative, which is to say not very crucial at all.

This degree of metatext in a showbiz story would normally be in aid of satire, but Jay Kelly is markedly earnest and short on cynicism – unless you count the accidental irony of a film in thrall to classic Hollywood moviemaking being produced entirely by Netflix. There are no villains in this swirl of industry players and hangers-on: Sandler plays the star’s harried but devoted manager Ron in a careworn, cuddly register, getting the most sympathetic scenes of an already softball script as he attempts to juggle family-man duty with stout loyalty to his clients. As Kelly’s likewise weary publicist, Laura Dern gets a few more vinegary lines – consider her character a gentler cousin of the bilious divorce lawyer she played to Oscar-winning effect in Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) – but still plays her as an essentially good egg. Jim Broadbent puts in a genial cameo as the paternalistic filmmaker who discovered and mentored Kelly out of acting school; Patrick Wilson is all bluff no-hard-feelings jocularity as a rival actor accustomed to being second choice; Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the film with Baumbach, appears briefly as an amiably ditzy hair and make-up artist.

Pretty much everyone on the Hollywood food chain, then, gets a decent rap – Baumbach and Mortimer seem at pains to present the industry as one big bickering family, albeit one that often diverts its members away from their own flesh and blood. It’s a relief, then, when occasional surges of lasting bitterness and animosity break through the general, vaguely but sweetly melancholic cheer. In a film so in love with stardom that barely one speaking part is filled by an unfamiliar face – pity poor Jamie Demetriou and Patsy Ferran, required merely to beam formlessly as fans in Kelly’s orbit – Riley Keough gives the best, tangiest performance here as Kelly’s unassuming eldest daughter, briskly aiming to cut him out of her life just as he more or less dropped her in childhood, at the distracting zenith of his career.

Billy Crudup, too, provides some semblance of reality as Tim, a former acting-school pal nursing a grudge over a critical, hijacked audition. A violent altercation between Tim and Kelly gives the film an early snap and tension, though there’s some passive poignancy in how this subplot quietly disappears, hushed away off-screen by the star’s unseen lawyers and aides. But then eliding unpleasantness is the general modus operandi of this breezily watchable but frustratingly anodyne film, in which even the gauzy sunlight and late-afternoon shadows of Linus Sandgren’s handsome cinematography feel designed to comfort and flatter its title character while he’s at a bit of a low personal ebb. Why we should feel similarly obligated is hard to say.

► Jay Kelly is now streaming on Netflix UK.