George Clooney in a Fun but Soft Hollywood Drama

In “Jay Kelly,” George Clooney plays a movie star very much like George Clooney. By that, I don’t simply mean that the outlines of Clooney’s career and that of the character sync up just so (though they do). As the movie is conceived, Jay Kelly, a popular and prestigious Hollywood actor for more than three decades, with an array of crowd-pleasing dramas, high-end action hits, and robust awards films behind him, is a character who has been constructed around the very DNA of George Clooney’s personality. He’s got that same brash feel-good charm, that effortless smooth quickness of mind, and more than that he’s got that quality of finely honed grinning sincerity — the ability to talk to anyone and make them feel like he’s really listening, that he’s eager to connect, not because he’s putting on an act but because that’s just the way he is. At the same time, the film slyly encourages us to ask: How much of that very quality is an act?

In the opening scene, Jay is on set, wrapping up his latest movie, filming a death scene — the character has been gut-shot, but his loyal dog is there, and so, in the distance, is an oversize neon Pepsi-Cola sign. When Jay tells the director that he’d like to do another take, we see that Jay hasn’t lost his perfectionism, the devotion to getting it right that’s part of what made him a star. (He’s also hooked on second chances.) And we see that he’s no prima donna; he has a way of making even his most domineering demands land lightly. Which is very Clooneyesque.

His entourage, however, might view it differently. Jay, away from the set, has a crew of royal handlers who surround him as they attempt to satisfy his every whim. There’s his long-time manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), his hard-bitten publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), and several other high-powered masochistic showbiz vassals. Working for Jay, we gather, is no picnic, and they’ve all been at it a long time. Someone observes that Jay isn’t 25 anymore. “He’s not 55 anymore,” comes the reply, which in movie-star terms puts him in the category called is-he-aging-like-fine-wine-or-just-aging-out?     

But it’s not until we see Jay with one of his two daughters, Daisy (Grace Edwards), who is about to go off to study biotech engineering at Johns Hopkins, that we glimpse the hidden side of him — the vulnerable side. He doesn’t want her to go; it’s going to leave him feeling alone. (Which makes us think: He must really be alone.) Jay’s old British actor chum, Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), has just died, and there’s a lovely flashback to the two of them cooking dinner in Jay’s palatial L.A. home, reminiscing about the movie they first did together — “Cranberry Street,” which was 35 years ago. They call each other “Pop” and “FKFKFKF,” like family. But in the flashback, Peter, whose career has faded, wants Jay to lend his name to a project he’s working on, so that he can get back in the game. Jay won’t do it. It’s not the right career move for him, and the politics of his career always come first.

Directed by Noah Baumbach, from a script he co-wrote with the actor Emily Mortimer, “Jay Kelly” is a fictional inside-the-movie-world portrait that’s been made with a great deal of care and affection and entertaining dish, and it’s the definition of a movie that goes down easy. Clooney, playing such a direct variation on himself, does an expert job of showing us celebrity from the inside out, deconstructing the very notion of stardom. And coming after “White Noise,” Baumbach’s overly conceptual mash-note homage of a literary adaptation, “Jay Kelly” returns this filmmaker to what he does best: an avid, dialogue-driven drama that seems ripped from personal observation. The last film Baumbach made in this mode, “Marriage Story,” was, I thought, a new peak for him — one of the greatest movies ever made about marriage, and about the collapse of a marriage. So I had hopes that “Jay Kelly” would do for movie stardom what “Marriage Story” did for divorce.

But for all its enjoyable qualities, and its vivid details (like the way Jay colors the gray out of his eyebrows with a Sharpie), “Jay Kelly” is movie that takes a “hard” look at stardom yet has a soft center. As a character study, it wants to examine a celebrity who’s soulful and charismatic enough to be played by George Clooney, and to reveal his hidden colder side. To that end, I’d say it does…and it doesn’t.

Just as Jay is coming out of Peter’s funeral, he runs into someone he hasn’t seen for years: his old actor buddy Timothy (played by an unnervingly jittery-beneath-the-frozen-smile Billy Crudup), who creeps up to him in the parking lot. The two were members of the same Method Acting class, and Jay, trying to be the decent fellow he’s branded himself as being (and maybe is), says that they should hang out some time — in fact, how about right now? They go for a drink, and are talking about the old days, when Timothy blurts out his confession: He despises Jay. And that’s because Jay, he says, stole everything from him. It all happened on a day that’s become part of Jay’s legend, the one where he tagged along with Timothy on an audition and wound up landing the part himself. But Timothy regards what happened as a toxic betrayal.

This sounds like it has the intriguing makings of a murky and maybe ugly formative incident, one that will hover in the background like some ghostly metaphorical anecdote out of a Tennessee Williams drama. But then Baumbach does something surprising: He gives us a complete flashback to this primal event. We see the young Jay accompanying the young Timothy to his audition (it’s for “Cranberry Street”), we see Broadbent’s Peter hovering on the couch, and we see Timothy flub the audition, badly. (He’s trembling.) So Jay, who wasn’t planning on doing this, asks if he can audition too. And he does.

Call me an enabler of toxicity, but I watched this scene and saw absolutely nothing wrong with anything Jay did. We can certainly see how Timothy, after all these years, would still be pissed, but the scene, as presented, is not a betrayal, except in one sense: It betrays that Baumbach isn’t going to let his movie-star hero undergo the kind of true reckoning that might have made him a great character. His peccadilloes are going to be user-friendly, and what’s more they’re going to be undercut by the Clooney persona.

Jay goes to visit his other daughter in San Diego, and Jessica, played with snappish righteousness by Riley Keough, more or less hates him. She insists that Jay accompany her to her therapist’s office, where the therapist, a New Age charlatan, reads out loud the letter she wrote to Jay, accusing her father of abandoning her when she was growing up. It was after Jay and her mother split up (one of several divorces for Jay), and he simply wasn’t there. He was away on his movie sets.

Okay, that could happen. It’s a cliché, and it’s one we don’t actually see being enacted (we’re simply told that Jay was an absentee father), but it’s eminently plausible; he even admits it. The trouble is that Clooney, while his Jay certainly treats his business handlers in an entitled fashion, plays almost every scene in such a warm and engaging way that in our moviegoing reptile brains we don’t buy the idea that Jay, when he was around, was such a bad dad. It’s a concept the film never completely brings to life. “Jay Kelly” wants us to touch the flawed soul of Jay (it has him looking back over his life almost like Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol”), yet it’s working so hard to make him likable that it winds up seeming a bit toothless in its condemnation.

Jay, after his shattering encounter with Timothy, decides to walk out on the movie he’s supposed start shooting in a week and fly off to Europe instead, where he’ll tag along with Daisy, the daughter who can still tolerate him, on her pre-academic jaunt from Paris to Italy. The heart of the movie is Jay on a road trip — a train trip, in fact — through Italy, ultimately leading him to a career tribute that’s being given to him in Tuscany. (It’s the sort of event he always turned down, because he didn’t want to feel like it was gold-watch time.) On the train, Jay mingles with the mere Italian mortals (and is casually empathetic with them), and he even rescues an old lady’s purse from a crazed German dude who’s gone off his meds. The action flows, the badinage is fast and fun.

But as much as I enjoyed a lot of “Jay Kelly,” on some level I didn’t buy it. (That Jay’s own loveless father, played by Stacy Keach, comes all the way to Tuscany for the tribute and then doesn’t even stick around for it is…too much.) Adam Sandler gives a sly, sheepish, beautifully mournful performance as Ron, the stubborn mensch of a manager who calls his clients “puppy,” and who’s juggling two of them: Jay, who he’s been catering to for so long that it’s starting to suffocate him, and the hack-actor-turned-TV-star Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson), who’s devoted to his family. (He’s the anti-Jay, schlepping his clan along for his own Tuscany tribute.) By the end, Ron is the only one left for Jay; that’s how much Jay has alienated everyone. And then, at the tribute, there’s a montage of Jay Kelly movie clips — and they’re all clips from actual Clooney movies, showing just how close his career is to Jay’s. With one exception: We never have to pretend that what we relish about George Clooney is only gray-coif-and-tan-skin-deep.