Jay Kelly Review: Life is a Stage, But it Matters

Clooney, Crudup and Sandler excel in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, which teaches us to embrace our illusions because it’s all we have.

But things are about to change for our protagonist, and it all starts with two unexpected events. The first is the sudden death of his mentor, Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent, of Paddington in Peru), the first director who ever gave him a chance. The second is an unexpected reunion with his former acting school friend Timothy (Billy Crudup, of The Morning Show), which leads to a conversation that soon turns hostile when the latter reveals he can’t stand him. “Is there a person in there?,” asks Timothy when things starts to get heated; “Maybe you don’t actually exist.”

Timothy’s words have so much of an impact on Jay that he soon decides to quit acting altogether, despite his manager Ron and publicist Liz’s (Laura Dern, of Marriage Story) insistence that he already has another movie in the works. But Jay has already gone, both physically – to Paris and Italy, where his daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards, Asteroid City) is about to go on holiday with her friends – and mentally, unable to stop replaying key moments from his life in his mind that shaped him into the person he is today.

These flashbacks are so connected to his present life that all he has to do to relive them is to simply “walk into a scene”, and watch. And so, we’re taken back to his drama school days, when Timothy was clearly the talented one and Jay lived in his shadow, having yet mastered how to really inhabit a character. Yet it’s Jim who gets his first chance in the industry – one that should have belonged to Timothy, as he was only meant to be at that audition to support his friend. But then again, it’s Jimmy’s memory we’re watching, so how reliable is this recollection? And why is present-day Timothy watching that same scene as it plays?

In true Baumbach fashion, Jay Kelly starts asking fascinating questions right from the start. The writer-director and co-writer Emily Mortimer (in her screenwriting debut) blend present, memory, and fiction to the point that they become interchangeable, eventually merging into a whole that exist on a different dimension entirely. Soon, we begin to notice how fictional Jay Kelly’s real life actually is, as everything we see starts feeling like a scene from a movie, including the time he spends with his family and friends – or, as he’d like to call them, the people to whom he gives 15% of his earnings.

But if acting is pretending to be someone else, can doing it for a living really have any purpose? If one’s life is lived following those exact same dynamics, does life itself even mean anything? And does the man who lives it even exist at all?

“You know how difficult it is to be yourself? You try it,” says Jay’s teacher in one of his flashbacks, to help him with a performance, in a piece of advice that will accompany our protagonist throughout his life, whether he’s being worshipped by adoring crowds or abandoned by the only people he’s ever really cared about. As Jay’s own illusions about the person he is start to crumble and he becomes more self-aware about how little substance his life has actually had, our hero loses himself, and even risks disappearing entirely. If the entire world worships you but nobody actually knows you, are you even anything at all?

Baumbach explores existential territory in Jay Kelly, but this is also one of the director’s funniest movies in years. As you follow Jay, Ron and the rest of the characters on their adventures, you’ll barely even feel the 132′ runtime, as the film flows so well, providing the right humor to accompany the thought-provoking themes at its core.

Every single cast member delivers the material to perfection, starting from George Clooney, who is finally given the chance to showcase his range as an actor in a way that we haven’t seen from him in many years. But Billy Crudup and Adam Sandler are just as impressive, fully embracing their respective characters’ quirks but never forgetting about their heart, with impeccable comedic timing and fantastic chemistry with Clooney that makes their scenes together so enjoyable to watch.

Laura Dern, Riley Keough, Emily Mortimer, and Louis Partridge and Kyle Soller as young Jay and Timothy have less screen time all both make the most of it, delivering memorable turns that further improve the film, and so do appearances from Greta Gerwig, Alba Rohrwacher, and even more stars. Crudup is also responsible for the funniest scene of the entire movie, but there is so much packed into the film that I found myself giggling at the most absurd scenarios throughout.

Much like in Baumbach’s White Noise, much of the humor also comes from the use of sound and silence, with characters often speaking on top of each other to the extent that it’s hard to understand what they’re saying at times, but that definitely helps set the mood and convey their personalities and mindframes. Visually, the film is gorgeous too; your eyes will be glued to the screen from the stunning long take at the start till the very end of our protagonist’s journey across time and space.

In the best Baumbach tradition, this is also a film that has a lot to say about the human experience, and that isn’t afraid to delve into some dark themes. But Jay Kelly also leaves us with hope that, maybe, movies – and art as a whole – can mean something after all. Maybe, despite all the wrong choices we made, the cheesecakes we didn’t want, and the people we disappointed, betrayed or abandoned, we still have something, be it a friend who remained despite it all or something we created that made us feel part of a whole. And maybe it’s all a performance, and it’s all an illusion, but it’s your illusion and you can still embrace it, because it belongs to you, and it’s all you have.

Jay Kelly had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 28, 2025. The film will be released in US theatres on November 14, 2025 and globally on Netflix on December 5.