There’s a reason stories of retrospect and regret are told from the perspective of actors and directors, rather than tradies or insurance adjustors. Those are the people screenwriters know best, and you’re suppose to write what you know. Sometimes the actor or director is also the screenwriter. More than that, it’s because those careers involve trade-offs, family life sacrificed at the altar of fame and fortune and the adoration of others. Those careers present very cinematic versions of what we all go through, writ large.

If done well, these stories should make us think of our own lives, our own regrets, as you don’t have to be an internationally known celebrity to have casually neglected your children until the point it’s too late. And Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, which has just debuted on Netflix after a short theatrical run, is done well. It starts out feeling a tad on the solipsistic side, a tad overwritten in the lyricism with which characters – not just the titular actor played by George Clooney – reflect on the past couple decades of their careers. Accumulating power as any good film should, Baumbach’s film leaves you ready to go hug your own kids before they’ve gone off into the world.

Jay Kelly has had a George Clooney-like career as a movie star, but it’s a career at least one person thinks he didn’t earn. At the funeral for the director who first discovered him (Jim Broadbent), Jay is lightly accosted by Tim Galligan (Billy Crudup), who greets him under the guise of friendship, then subjects him to extreme recrimination when they go out for a drink, accusing Jay of having stolen his career. See Tim, the far better acting prospect at the time, invited Jay to his audition with the recently deceased director, but it was Jay who got the job and forged a career in the spotlight, while Tim remained in the middle.

It turns out this is just the first person Jay wronged on his road to the top, and some of them are only just working it out now. Jay’s certainly made his manager, Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler), a rich man, but Ron is now trying to figure out if they’re really the friends Jay says they are, or if Jay just uses his movie star charm to manipulate him. Jay’s also weighing up whether to accept a tribute to his career in Tuscany, and was planning not to, but the incident with Tim seems to have awakened him to other slights in his life. Maybe he’d like to join his younger daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards), soon departing for university, on her trip to Europe with her friends, or maybe he’d like to reconnect to his older daughter from a different relationship, Jessica (Riley Keough), from whom he’s estranged.

On a circuitous trip through Europe that will take him to this tribute, he’ll cross paths with his publicist Liz (Laura Dern), a fellow actor whose career is not quite at Jay’s level (Patrick Wilson), his own estranged father (Stacy Keach), and a handful of others in the orbit of a person of his star wattage, who seem to have come out the other side of his career the lesser for it. He’ll also get lost in reverie, looking back at his past, including himself as a younger man (Charlie Rowe), and an actress with whom he had an affair many years ago (Eve Hewson).

Although the movie is named after Clooney’s character and he is clearly the lead, Jay Kelly has an unusual double duty in that it is also part of Sandler’s ongoing deal with Netflix. There’s a significant amount of the film’s 130 minutes spent on his character’s family. In fact, this movie is sort of a greatest hits of both Sandler’s and Baumbach’s careers, as it features Sandler’s daughter Sadie playing Ron’s daughter, as well as Baumbach’s partner, Greta Gerwig, in the smaller role of Ron’s wife. (Sandler’s own wife, frequent nepotism hire Jackie Sandler, is nowhere to be seen.) Then Dern also earned an Oscar for Baumbach’s Marriage Story.

This should be seen as a retrospective for all three central figures, and it has compelling and differing resonances for the two lead actors. Clooney was famously a bachelor for most of his life, only finally becoming the father of twins less than ten years ago, when he was in his mid-fifties. Sandler, on the other hand, is currently demonstrating an extreme version of not neglecting his children, having cast them in multiple of his movies.

However, it’s fair to say this film gets so much out of both men because it speaks to their truth. There’s a point where we see a montage of clips from Clooney’s actual movies, and Jay Kelly has gotten us to understanding that Clooney’s celebrated career basically meant having no family life. We got the sense Clooney enjoyed his status as unmarried, but this choice may have also sacrificed the ability to see his own children grow into young adults the same ages as his children in this film – at least not before he’s in his mid-seventies.

There’s an aspect of Fellini’s 8 ½ here, which for many filmmakers would be biting off way more than they could chew. This does lead to a few moments of awkwardness and self-indulgence on Baumbach’s part. That’s to be expected when you’re going for something as sprawling and introspective as this, across multiple European countries and multiple time periods in the character’s mind, with plenty of flights of fancy to accompany them. Speaking of trade-offs, it’s one we’re more than willing to make to get something with the ultimate cumulative poignancy of Jay Kelly.

For those less inclined toward middle-aged introspection, Jay Kelly also exists as a fun window into the world of making movies, including the so-called “riders” that appear in celebrity contracts, sometimes errantly (Jay always has a piece of cheesecake in his dressing room, even though he doesn’t like cheesecake). Baumbach’s truest statement of his own sentimentality comes in an opening scene devoted to the movie business, a single-take shot swooping through a set as multiple conversations overlap. These conversations range from gossip, to banal set instructions, to sardonic takes on the industry, to justified concerns about the viability of movies as a commercial art form.

Baumbach, along with his co-writer Emily Mortimer (an actress with her own small part in the film), have crammed in all the various forms of nostalgia you can have about a life lived. At age 56 and after 30 years of making features, Baumbach will likely still make many more films. This ultimately weighty film would send us off well if he didn’t.

 

Jay Kelly is now streaming on Netflix.