George Clooney, Adam Sandler in Noah Baumbach Film

Noah Baumbach’s best work is invariably personal. Though none could be called strictly autobiographical, films like The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story, Frances Ha and The Meyerowitz Stories all bear the unmistakable signs of lived experience — of family, marriage, parenthood, friendship or milieu. It’s possible that in his latest feature, Jay Kelly, co-written with Emily Mortimer, the pampered Hollywood star and the selfless manager who always puts his client’s needs first are versions of industry professionals Baumbach has encountered. But only faintly possible. Mostly, they seem like made-to-measure components of a bittersweet buddy movie that overloads on saccharine.

That’s not to say Jay Kelly isn’t at times witty and entertaining. George Clooney’s megawatt charm makes it easy to warm even to a guy like the title character. He has everything and yet suddenly realizes his life is virtually empty; his celebrity-bubble existence has left him out of touch with how the rest of the world lives while nudging the people about whom he’s supposed to care most to the margins. Poor Jay.

As much as we can be amused by his dark spiral of self-discovery, seeing this dashing silver fox flashing his perfect smile or gazing out from a billboard caressed by spotlights makes it hard to invest much in his problems. That image, oozing old-Hollywood glamour like a modern-day Cary Grant, almost makes the majestic Renaissance beauty of a town piazza in Tuscany look drab — figuratively speaking. To be fair, nothing in Linus Sandgren’s fluid and inventive cinematography looks drab.

Difficulty caring is not a problem with Jay’s devoted manager, Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler), the main buffer between his top client and the world. He’s permanently on call for matters both pressing and trivial, stepping in to fix whatever situation arises so that Jay never has to be concerned. The unforced poignancy of Ron’s emotional arc gives the shallow movie some much-needed heart. Ron comes to realize that his fulltime commitment to Jay has nullified his own needs, making his family feel like second-class citizens, especially his justifiably impatient wife Lois (Greta Gerwig).

Ron is probably Jay’s only real friend, and yet the actor puts a glib spin on their bond when he tells his manager: “You’re my friend who takes 15 percent of my earnings.” Reducing their relationship to its transactional bones is a low blow that hurts Ron and underlines their inequality.

The movie opens with a Sylvia Plath quote: “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.” At its core, Jay Kelly is about a cossetted man taking on that responsibility after decades of enabled complacency wrapped up in movie-star charisma.

The introspection starts kicking in as he wraps a shoot, a final day captured by Sandgren in a virtuoso single take that opens the movie — perhaps an homage to Robert Altman’s epic oner at the start of The Player. The camera winds through a studio, taking in the village of people required to make the production’s wheels turn, before arriving at Jay as he shoots his last scene. It also serves as a declaration of love from Baumbach to the chaotic collective process of filmmaking.

With two weeks until his next project, Jay intends to spend the time with his youngest daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) before she goes off to college. But Daisy, who seems accustomed to making plans without her dad’s input, is heading to Europe with friends to catch a jazz festival in Paris and then drive to Italy, making it clear she does not want Jay tagging along.

While he’s still pouting about Daisy’s rejection, Jay’s equilibrium is shaken by the death of his mentor, the director Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), who gave him his breakthrough movie role. It’s telling that Jay’s indebtedness didn’t stretch to lending his name to a film Schneider was struggling to get off the ground after a career downturn.

At the funeral, he’s approached by Tim (Billy Crudup), his old roommate and fellow acting student from way back. They go for drinks and seem to reconnect. Jay is self-effacing about his success and only mildly patronizing to Tim, who’s now a child therapist. But old resentments surface before long, escalating into a fist fight.

Throughout the film, Jay revisits memories of significant moments from the past that trigger his soul-searching. A major wakeup call comes from his semi-estranged older daughter Jessica (Riley Keough), a pre-K teacher in San Diego burnt many times by Jay’s absentee parenting and broken promises. She calls him an empty vessel, asking, “Is there a person in there? Maybe you don’t actually exist.”

Anxious to mend their relationship, Jay agrees to go with her to therapy. But her ex-surfer shrink Carter (Josh Hamilton) causes him to bolt when he brings up Jessica’s abandonment issues. Jay is not good at being judged.

Before anyone on his team knows what’s happening, he has backed out of the upcoming film, had assault charges filed against him, tracked Daisy’s itinerary like a stalker and agreed to accept an Italian arts festival career award as justification for crashing his daughter’s vacation.

Since Jay turned down the award until it became convenient, Ron in the meantime persuaded the festival to present it instead to another of his clients, Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson), a younger actor with a loving wife (Isla Fisher) and what seems like a solid family connection. Jay refuses to play second fiddle to a guy he believes is an inferior talent. But what’s more important is the effect Ben’s arrival in Tuscany, and his decision to rethink his career strategy, has on Ron.

There’s a warming melancholy undertow in Ron’s scenes that’s rarely there with Jay, possibly because no matter how much he behaves like a selfish A-hole, Clooney’s magnetism earns him a pass.

Baumbach and Mortimer give the uneven movie a strong setup, but once the action leaves Los Angeles, it too often slips into the kind of studied quirkiness that made much of the director’s last feature, White Noise, hard to take.

There’s humor in the script’s observation of the absurd degree to which celebrities are indulged, like the slice of cheesecake that keeps turning up because Jay once requested it and thereafter it was written into his rider. Likewise, in the mobilization of a sizable support team (including Mortimer as hair and makeup artist Candy), all dutifully piling into Jay’s private plane to fly to Paris at a moment’s notice.

But when they find themselves for contrived reasons on a train to Italy with no first-class cars, there’s a Fellini-lite desperation to Jay’s antics. He turns an entire carriage of starstruck tourists into a circus at which he’s the ringmaster, letting himself believe for a moment that this is what being in touch with real people feels like. While an angered Daisy tries to set him straight, he’s soon back in heroic performance mode, chasing down a German cyclist (Lars Eidinger) who snatches an elderly woman’s handbag.

Much more effective than all that strained screwball is the drama of Ron on the sidelines with Jay’s longtime personal publicist Liz (Laura Dern), busy putting out fires. Dern is terrific in the role, acerbic and briskly efficient, but she disappears too early as members of Jay’s entourage start breaking off.

Ron and Liz have a romantic history, but she’s clear-eyed and unemotional when articulating the reasons their relationship was truncated before it began: “Jay always comes first. We were never going to have a moment just for us.” Liz has run out of the patience needed to look after an overgrown infant, correcting Ron’s delusion that Jay sees them as part of his family by explaining that the notion of family for their client only goes one way.

The movie gains some emotional weight after they arrive in Tuscany, when the always enchanting Alba Rohrwacher steps in as the festival’s VIP guest liaison. Jay’s father (Stacy Keach) also shows up, a retired 35-year veteran of the John Deere company who was never overly impressed by his son’s career but nonetheless accepted the invitation. The senior Kelly charms the organizers at an honorary dinner, not with Jay’s slick professionalism but with his own plain-spoken unpretentiousness.

There’s a vague air of condescension in the depiction of well-heeled Italians eagerly inhaling Hollywood stardust, but anyone with affection for Clooney’s screen career will respond to the actor getting misty-eyed over a festival tribute reel in which his own body of work becomes Jay’s.

Clooney is certainly game, playing a deeply flawed character who has considerable overlap with his own public persona. But the script lets him down, to the point where you might wonder if Jay has been humbled in any lasting way by the string of defections among those meant to be sharing in his celebration. This might have worked better if Jay had been an unapologetic dick rather than a man almost endearingly oblivious to his privilege. No amount of tender underscoring from composer Nicholas Brittel can make us feel much for his sudden loneliness since Clooney’s natural charisma is like armor. It makes the movie toothless and insincere.

Perhaps the key exception to that comes late in the film, when Jay takes a walk alone in the misty woods and as night falls, slips into the memory of a real or imagined heart to heart with Jessica. Keough is lovely in the scene, her character’s compassion tempered by decades of bruising neglect, and she seems to spark some genuine ruefulness in her father.

Ultimately though, the film is most satisfying when it homes in on Ron’s regrets. “All my memories are movies,” he tells Jay. That sad exchange is one of many touching moments with Sandler, whose vulnerable performance creates an intimacy that Jay Kelly seldom nails with its title character.

There’s pleasure to be had from Sandler’s nuanced work and from the ensemble’s ridiculously deep bench of gifted supporting players. But the director’s fourth feature for Netflix is mid-tier Baumbach at best. In terms of movies about a celebrated film industry veteran and his failings as a father, it has nothing on Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value.