‘Jay Kelly’ (2025) Netflix Movie Review - Noah Baumbach's Fine and Forgettable Comedy Drama

The weight of mortality hangs heavily on Noah Baumbach, and he channels it through a medium he claims he has once again fallen in love with: MOVIES! With Jay Kelly, Baumbach examines the pros and perils of being a hugely successful movie star — a movie star with grey hair and a lonely life. The movie opens in a studio where the titular character, played by George Clooney, finishes working on his new film. The scene he performs finds him taking his last breaths as he says these lines, "I don't want to be here anymore, Jerry. I want to leave this party." Baumbach, through this opening, immediately announces what and how Jay Kelly is going to be. Jay will wrestle with his fame, identity, and mortality, while Baumbach will sort out his feelings through his filmmaking. Jay, a man who has a tough time connecting with his two daughters and has unresolved issues with his daddy, also ultimately deals with himself by realizing that his work has made him a part of a different family — the one who goes to the movies. This is why Jay Kelly comes across as one of those love letters to cinema things, but this letter sounds obvious when Baumbach deals with the subject explicitly. What this means is that the opening sequence inside a studio presents a pretty, dreamy picture of what it's like to make films. The chaos, the stress, the madness of it all is elided, or rather displayed like a seductive fantasy that resembles an outsider's view of what it's like to spend a day on the set with all the people trying to complete a schedule on time. 

Even the last scene, involving shots from Jay's filmography being projected onto a big screen, feels like a trite moment whispering, "Hey, movies are magic." Baumbach's love letter, then, only turns effective when he simply concentrates on the film he's making. What those moments highlight is the director's superb ear for dialogue, which flows on-screen like music. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they hit their target directly. When Ron (Adam Sandler), Jay's manager, tries to stop Liz (Laura Dern), Jay's publicist, from leaving, he reveals how at one point in the past he planned to propose to her at the Eiffel Tower and this confession opens a door to an alternate reality where we imagine how Liz and Ron's life would have been if things had turned out differently. When Jay, on a train in Paris, tells Ron that he's remembering things he hadn't thought about in a long time, Ron starts unburdening his own familial issues on him. Their words collide, but Jay's problems take priority. In fact, Jay always wins. No situation, no relationship, no emergency is allowed to be as crucial as Jay's thoughts, Jay's feelings. It doesn't matter if Daisy (Grace Edwards), Jay's youngest daughter, wants to go on a trip with her friends, instead of spending the week with the great Jay Kelly. Jay wants to be with her daughter, no? He will, like a stalker, follow her and "accidentally" meet her on her journey. 

Why doesn't Daisy want to spend quality time with her dad? Why does even Jessica (Riley Keough), the eldest daughter, avoid him? Because Jay, as a young and successful superstar, was always busy—and he's still too preoccupied with himself to truly care about anyone. He asks Daisy about her trip, but doesn't really listen. He goes to a therapy session with Jessica and walks out the moment he feels uncomfortable. With Jay, it's always about what he wants and how he feels. Any concern or interest he shows in others is essentially performative. For example, he asks Ron about a match, then interrupts him as soon as he starts talking. Ron, in some ways, feels like another Jay in the making: he's also so consumed by his job that he fails to give his own family enough time. He calls Jay "puppy," though apparently he calls all his clients "puppy." Ron motivates Jay, panders to him, and sees him as a friend. But Jay is also Ron's source of income. Can genuine friendship really exist when money is involved? Ron mentions that Jay attended his daughter's sweet 16, but Liz then sharply reminds him that he wasn't at Daisy's graduation. "You weren't invited because it only goes one way," she says, puncturing the bubble of Ron's fantasy.

Ron sees his job as supporting a great artist — an artist who shares with other human beings what it is to be a human being. For Baumbach, a great artist like Jay is a thief. As a young, aspiring actor, Jay (Charlie Rowe) stole his best friend/roommate's (Billy Crudup) idea and bagged a role that put him on the path to fame and money. The whole movie, then, can be considered as Jay's comeuppance. He betrayed someone close to him, so now, he has no one who wants to be close to him. Baumbach's ideas regarding fate and punishment seem plucked from a children's novel. They are plain and simplistic. The scene where a drama teacher educates Jay about what it means to be a star and how relentless one must be to achieve such a significant objective could very well be, in bold letters, labeled as "Life Lesson 101." And all those transitions from the train to a set or an auditorium are too distracting and flashy. Baumbach conjures more visual magic through the train windows, transforming them into a shifting dance of shadow and light. Jay Kelly ends with Jay asking for another take, another try. He wants another chance to live his life differently. 

The concept, as well as that ending, merely sounds moving. It's the kind of discussion one pretends is "deep" after getting drunk on a boys' night. And Baumbach keeps his story at that low, formulaic level through a steady discharge of obvious, sentimental, unambiguous scenes. In Richard Linklater's Blue Moon, Lorenz Hart says something along the lines of, "It's easy to sell tickets to the audience by being mawkish and unimaginative." Baumbach lays his intentions bare—so clearly, so melodramatically—that he rests one hand on our shoulder, points toward his targets with the other, and murmurs, "Smile. Weep." The actors, especially Clooney and Sandler, wear expressions suggesting the eerie awareness of witnessing their own funeral, surveying who's arrived, and smiling at the warm eulogies. The grandest speech, though, is made by Baumbach, who basically says, "I have learned how to love movies and my life," and asks us to give him a second chance by ignoring whatever the hell was White Noise. Well, he needs to put in more effort because Jay Kelly simply evaporates while you're watching. It's a sugar-candy of a film — sweet, fine, forgettable. The movie doesn't stick in your head; it has all the staying power of a bland Netflix original. Go on, guess where it's streaming.

Final Score- [4.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times