Jay Kelly (2025)
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Marlon Brando
17 min read
The article directly references Brando as the ultimate standard Jay Kelly measures himself against, with a pivotal flashback showing young Jay swallowing a photo of Brando before an audition. Understanding Brando's revolutionary impact on acting and his legendary status provides essential context for Jay's artistic aspirations and insecurities.
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Noah Baumbach
19 min read
As the director and co-writer of Jay Kelly, Baumbach's filmography and recurring themes of family dysfunction, aging, and intellectual anxiety directly inform this film's exploration of a movie star's midlife crisis. His previous work (Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale) provides context for the film's introspective, character-driven approach.
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Divine Comedy
10 min read
The reviewer explicitly identifies a Dante's Inferno allusion in the foggy forest scene with Jessica, quoting the famous opening lines about being lost 'midway upon the journey of our life.' Understanding Dante's masterwork enriches the film's meditation on midlife crisis, moral reckoning, and the journey through personal darkness.
Jay Kelly (2025)
In theaters and streaming on Netflix
It can sound pretentious to mention “art” in the same breath as “movie star”. But this movie, however tentatively, suggests such a connection – only to let it drop just when we’re most intently wondering if it could be true.
Jay Kelly (George Clooney) is an A-List movie actor turning 60, and he’s proud/nervous about reaching that milestone.
His agent-manager and closest friend Ron (Adam Sandler) reminds him, at a moment when Jay’s feeling down, that he’s not just a bankable leading man but also an “artist”.
We only hear the word “artist” applied to Jay that one time. It might have helped if we’d gotten to hear it – and watch him absorb it – more often.
Jay is at the peak of his career when we meet him, but it feels as though he’s on a cliff edge, maybe about to tip over into decline. Self-doubt is making him desperate.
Gazing anxiously in a mirror, his voice quivering, he chants to himself, in a self-healing mantra, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Robert De Niro – and adds, tremblingly, Jay Kelly.
He needs to feel he falls securely within that leading man pantheon. Does he belong there or not? The movie struggles to make up its mind.
But aging, an occupational hazard he surely must have seen coming, isn’t all that’s freaking him out. The screenplay by the director, Noah Baumbach, and Emily Mortimer, shows Jay suddenly – too suddenly, it seems to me – catching hell from all sides.
With a couple of free weeks between film projects, he all but begs his younger daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) to spend some quality time with him.
No thanks, she declares jauntily. Before starting college in the fall, she’s off to France and Italy with friends.
Jay asks if he could join them. Come on, Dad, she counters. She and her friends will be living cheaply and traveling on trains, which he well knows mega movie stars can’t do. (We can’t miss that, in this scene, father and daughter never touch.)
Sad but also piqued, Jay refuses to accept rejection. He makes a counter move. Even faithful Ron is surprised at his mood swing.
The actor has ordered Ron to turn down a “tribute” in Italy. To Jay, such celebrations feel like a performer’s past-his-prime kiss
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