George Clooney and Adam Sandler in Jay Kelly

You know the Bill Nighy plot in Love Actually in which famous but aging rockstar Billy Mack eventually confesses his love for his manager, Joe, after realizing that the beleaguered yet loyal Joe is his closest friend and is, in fact, the love of his life? Noah Baumbach’s new film, Jay Kelly, is basically that plot from Love Actually but starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler as a movie star and his beleaguered but loyal manager. In the film, which Baumbach co-wrote with Emily Mortimer, Clooney plays Jay Kelly, a world-famous and beloved movie star who is just George Clooney if he was a Divorced Man. Adam Sandler stars as his long-suffering manager-cum-best friend, Ron. They realize that in the end, love actually is all around.

Upon completing his latest film, actor Jay Kelly, who is everybody’s favorite person on set, goes home hoping to spend time with his youngest daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), only to find she is headed out on a European adventure before starting college. Conscious of getting older, Jay is trying to make up for lost time, though he already finds himself in the cat’s cradle, his daughters grown and distant. Daisy is, at least, somewhat available to him, though it’s clear she maintains some distance from her glamorous father. That might be because Jay’s older daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), is fully estranged after he spent most of her childhood working and becoming a huge movie star.

In an effort to spend time with Daisy, Jay follows her to Europe, dragging along his team of retainers, headed by Ron and his publicist Liz (Laura Dern). Ron is trying to be a more present father to his own family, but Jay’s demands shape his life and inevitably take him away from his family. Jay and Ron’s relationship is the heart of Jay Kelly, as Jay learns the limits of love and Ron learns to separate work from everything else. They’re co-dependent, Ron enabling Jay’s every whim, while Jay gives Ron an illusion of friendship that, really, only goes one way.

It's not that Jay Kelly is a bad movie, per se, it’s that it is insufferably navel-gazing and self-important. There is some interesting stuff here, especially regarding Jay’s fraught relationship with Jessica, and how he is sort of forcing Ron into a similar dynamic with his own daughter. But Baumbach & Co. cannot imagine a world in which Jay is not the hero—he literally has a heroic “real world” moment in the film—and there is no moment where Jay is allowed to look bad. Even his confrontations with Jessica allow Jay a certain kind of nobility, accepting her boundaries with an almost comical level of grace. Although there is a moment when Jay gets into a fight with an old acting school pal, Timothy (Billy Crudup), and he spends the rest of the film worried this incident will leak to the public. Don’t worry, it doesn’t. Jay Kelly is charmed.

The price of that charm, though, is his family. He’s obviously not going to have much of a relationship with Jessica, if any at all, and Daisy will keep a wall of self-protection between them, preemptively not allowing Jay to hurt her as he did Jessica. But the trade off is the adoration of fans around the world, and as Jay watches an audience watch a retrospective of his career, he seems okay with that. Sure, the only person there to witness his triumph is Ron, but he made so many people happy with his films. It was all worth it, I guess! 

Jay Kelly is an interesting companion for Marriage Story, another Baumbach film about creatives with messy personal lives (both films coming from a creative with a once-upon-a-time messy personal life). Jay Kelly is a far more upbeat film, with a more solipsistic perspective, particularly at the end, but it’s also a weightless film. Sure, there are plenty of details that people who work in the film industry will recognize, and George Clooney is effortlessly charming and rascally as Jay, and Adam Sandler is locked in as an overworked everyman. Jay Kelly is not without surface appeal. But there’s not much beyond that. A generous read is that it is satirical, though in that context it is a very weak brand of satire, offering nothing keener than “fame is a hollow enterprise”. Jay Kelly needs some bite, but it’s a toothless exploration of fame, family, and legacy, without much to say about any of it.

Jay Kelly will stream exclusively on Netflix from December 5, 2025.