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PORTSIDE CULTURE

NETFLIX’S JAY KELLY EULOGIZES AN INDUSTRY IT’S KILLING OFF  
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Eileen Jones
December 10, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Noah Baumbach and George Clooney’s Jay Kelly is a Netflix dramedy
about the death of Hollywood stardom and the theatrical experience.
Ironically, with Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros., the call is
definitely coming from inside the house. _

If Netflix has its way, the communal theatrical experience that its
new movie Jay Kelly eulogizes is certain to go extinct. , (Netflix)

 

_Jay Kelly _is the latest from director and _Barbie _cowriter Noah
Baumbach currently streaming on Netflix after a very limited
theatrical release — just enough to be Academy Award eligible of
course. The movie opens with a Sylvia Plath quote revealed through
smoke in order to emphasize its ephemeral quality: “It’s a hell of
a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody
else or nobody at all.”

While you’re mulling that over, a five-minute tracking shot ensues
showing a big Hollywood movie production in full swing. It’s the
last scene for the star, Jay Kelly (George Clooney), and it’s a
death scene. Lots of manly emoting, with a gunshot wound and a loyal
little dog and all. And then, Jay Kelly is “wrapped out,” with
such emotion that you wonder if he’s being “wrapped out”
forever, the last shot of Jay’s last film, though there’s no
reason given why that should be. He’s sixty, true, and he’s about
to plunge into a period of messy crisis in his personal life. But he
also appears to be such a Teflon-coated star, his popularity undented,
there’s nothing stopping him from carrying on as before.

_Jay Kelly_ is proving to be quite a popular dramedy on Netflix.
Presumably because it’s so lavishly made and such a smooth, creamy
consumable, while at the same time flattering audiences that we’re
all at long last really giving this whole film-stardom phenomenon a
big think. Jay Kelly comes to the solemn realization that “all my
memories are movies,” a dramatic statement suggesting he’s a
hollow man, hardly more than a flickering image himself. Meanwhile, he
seems quite meaty and substantial, and all of his memories that we do
see are of his bruising encounters with the disappointed people in his
life.

This is a mild, surprise-free portrait of the title character, a movie
star played by a movie star, George Clooney. In fact, the point seems
to be that the role was designed to be played by Clooney. Like
Clooney, Jay Kelly is a perpetual star with many popular
action-oriented movies to his name. He’s known for his high-voltage
smile and blinding handsomeness, with members of the general public
besotted with memories of his movies over the years. But perhaps the
limits on his stardom have had to do with the similarly Clooneyesque
problem of having so much charm, such a dazzling surface, that a kind
of assumption of shallowness seems to go with it.

Behind the scenes of Jay’s life, though, we get the non-Clooney
material, at least if we believe the publicity about Clooney’s loyal
long-term friendships, perfect marriage with a highly accomplished
human rights attorney, doting fatherhood, and humanitarian work. Jay
Kelly, on the other hand, is not the heroic figure he tends to play in
action films. He’s spent decades living a life of egocentric
selfishness, betraying friends, cheating on wives, neglecting
children, all in order to achieve and then maintain his stardom up
through his sixtieth year.

Jay’s truest friend is his self-sacrificing manager, Ron Sukenick
(Adam Sandler), the rocky bromance at the center of the film. Ron’s
convinced that when it comes to Jay’s stardom, “it’s something
we did together.” Meanwhile, Jay takes Ron for granted and, during a
climactic argument, says that what Ron has done, he’s simply done
for the standard 15 percent cut of Jay’s earnings.

Early on, Jay Kelly finds himself having a series of similarly
bruising encounters that make him aware of what his celebrity has cost
other people. The most scarring one occurs after the funeral of
Jay’s first director and longtime mentor, Pete Schneider (Jim
Broadbent), whom Jay shafted late in life by refusing to lend his name
to Schneider’s last-ditch attempt to get a film made. Jay gets into
a conversation with an old college buddy, Timothy Galligan (Billy
Crudup), once a talented aspiring actor and now a child psychologist.
Over a drink that initially seems friendly, Tim reveals his lifelong
hatred for Jay: “You stole my audition and my girlfriend, which at
twenty-three, was pretty much all I had.”

In a flashback, we see Young Jay (Charlie Rowe) go after the part Tim
was hoping to get, using Tim’s ideas for the character that he’d
told Jay about. Thereafter, Jay soared to stardom; Tim’s acting
career never got off the ground. A parking lot altercation ensues.

Afterward, sporting a black eye he refuses to explain, Jay takes a
stab at making amends to some of the people in his life. His youngest
child, daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards), is leaving for a European
vacation with her friends before she goes off to college. In order to
provide an excuse for his ill-advised trip chasing Daisy through
Europe, Jay belatedly accepts an offer from an Italian film festival
to stage a tribute to him, complete with garish trophy. It was an
event Ron had struggled to set up that Jay had, in fact, turned down
repeatedly.

Because it’s all one big impromptu quest to redeem the uglier
aspects of his past, Jay’s team has to scramble to find him
celeb-appropriate accommodations. This means Jay gets mixed in with
the public far more than he normally would in his normally cloistered
celebrity existence, such as an interlude on a crowded train in
France. The train was actually an elaborately built set, as you can
see if you watch _The Making of Jay Kelly_ also streaming on Netflix.
Oh, the money that went into this thing!

In keeping with the general opulence, there’s a first-rate cast,
including Laura Dern as Jay’s fed-up publicist; Riley Keough as
Jay’s disillusioned older daughter, Jessica; Stacy Keach as Jay’s
macho, envious, unloving father; Patrick Wilson as a rival actor;
Greta Gerwig as Ron’s wife, Lois; and Alba Rohrwacher as Jay’s
Italian tour guide. So many names even in small roles are indicative
of the film’s prestigious gleam, with all the posh trimmings.

High jinks and intense confrontations alternate in this dramedy before
the inevitably sentimental conclusion. The film festival scene
involves a Jay Kelly montage of clips from his career that is, of
course, also a montage of clips from George Clooney’s career. If
_The Making of Jay Kelly _is to be believed, Clooney apparently had
the camera in close-up on his face as he watched the montage for the
very first time. His real-life spontaneously teary reaction is the one
that made it into the film.

Director Baumbach calls _Jay Kelly_ “a celebration of filmmaking and
creativity” that also takes on the issue of an actor’s identity in
an industry that inevitably messes with it. Yet the portrait we have
of Jay Kelly is a fairly boilerplate one. Who doesn’t know that
major stardom fosters both egocentricity and identity slippage and
tends to be achieved at the expense of personal relationships? As
written by Baumbach along with cowriter actor Emily Mortimer, who also
plays Jay’s hairdresser, _Jay Kelly_ is a surprisingly unrevealing
movie about stardom and the inner workings of Hollywood. If the gold
standard is Billy Wilder’s scathing _Sunset Boulevard_ (1950) —
and it is — then where do we slot in this minor work?

_Jay Kelly_’s tone is elegiac, seeming to evoke the end of
something, judging by the elaborate opening scene alone. From the very
beginning of his career, George Clooney himself has been considered a
“throwback” to older Hollywood stars such as Clark Gable and Cary
Grant, and we see Jay Kelly reciting their names while studying
himself in a mirror, trying to make “Jay Kelly” sound either more
like a real old-time star or a regular human being. In _The Making of
Jay Kelly,_ we see that even the film’s score was designed to be
deliberately old-fashioned and classical, played by a big studio
orchestra and recorded on analog tape for “extra warmth.”

And of course, it’s not a big jump from there to thinking about the
end of cinema as we know it, with Netflix looming large as one of the
leading cinema-killers today. _Jay Kelly _was shot on 35mm film, a
pointless irony given its extremely limited theatrical release in a
few cities before it wound up on TV as yet another title in the vast
catalog of Netflix releases.

When it comes to token releases like these that scorn the idea of
movies as a mass medium best experienced communally in theaters,
Netflix is the leading offender. And its recent purchase of Warner
Bros. Discovery seems to represent a final signature on cinema’s
death warrant, greeted with justifiable alarm
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by members of the already ailing industry:

A group of film producers sent a letter to Congress on Thursday
stating that they had “grave concerns” about Netflix’s buying
Warner Bros. Discovery. The authors of the letter did not sign their
names for “fear of retaliation.”

“Netflix views any time spent watching a movie in a theater as time
not spent on their platform,” the letter said. “They have no
incentive to support theatrical exhibition, and they have every
incentive to kill it.”

So perhaps _Jay Kelly_ provides an oblique way to mourn the collapse
of an entire system by evoking once more — in a deliberately cozy
and familiar way — the fascinations of the movie star itself. The
final affirmation of _Jay Kelly_ is that of a system that’s going,
going, gone. In his personal life, Kelly was a jerk, yes, but that was
all part of being a big star who was part of an even bigger industry.
It’s only fitting that at the end he should sit holding hands with
his adoring manager, ecstatic to be subsumed in movie imagery running
on a big screen in a proper theater with a real-live audience packing
the house.

Ironically, if the studio behind _Jay Kelly _has its way, that
experience is certainly on the cusp of extinction.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck
podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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