Metacinema at its most boring. George Clooney plays George Clooney named Jay Kelly in Noah Baumbach’s Hollywood-insider drama, which premiered at last August’s Venice International Film Festival before streaming globally on Netflix last week.

The story follows an aging Hollywood A-lister, Clooney’s Jay Kelly, and his long-suffering manager Ron (Adam Sandler), aiming to dissect the price of fame and the invisible labor that keeps it running. Clooney and Sandler are competent actors, of course, but here they share zero rapport, with Sandler irritatingly calling everyone “puppy.”

A plodding examination of how stardom consumes not only the star but also everyone orbiting him, Jay Kelly critiques a global superstar’s priorities as having a domino effect — rippling from manager (who may or may not be a true friend) to publicist (Laura Dern) to makeup artist. Fame, in Baumbach’s depiction, is not only an individual burden but also a collective trap.

The film’s thesis is clear: the higher one climbs in Hollywood, the more one’s sense of self — and one’s short, private life — becomes public domain. The greatest downside, though, is family neglect. Kelly, in between movie projects, reaches out to his distant daughters (Riley Keough as Jessica and Grace Edwards as Daisy), hoping to what? We can’t really tell. Does he truly miss them or simply feel obligated in his role as a father?

A former method-acting classmate, Timothy (Billy Crudup), suddenly reappears from the past to unleash long-simmering envy and becomes a catalyst for Kelly and his entourage to spiral into a joyless Italian odyssey with his team of “enablers.” What follows is an inert road trip masquerading as self-discovery, with introspection that feels both too literal and too shallow.

Visually, Jay Kelly is a major departure from Baumbach’s usual intimate, “mumblecore aesthetic.” Working for the first time with cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land, First Man), Baumbach opts for epic cinematic scale. Shot on 35mm film, the movie is colorful, lush, and textured, with elegant long takes and tracking shots. Even watching on my iPhone, the images had a tactile, painterly quality.

But the beauty of its surfaces only made the experience more numbing. I found myself dozing off repeatedly, rewinding scenes just to catch what I’d missed. The characters are unrealistically nice, rooted in the same restrained civility, as though constantly performing. It’s impossible to tell where the artifice ends and the humanity begins.

Baumbach, co-writing with Emily Mortimer, seems severely self-conscious. The film lacks the signature neurosis and wit of his early works (Frances Ha, Mistress America, The Meyerowitz Stories), especially during his co-writing days with former romantic partner Greta Gerwig, who, in my opinion, is the better writer (she has a thankless role here as Sandler’s wife).

In those collaborations, the dialogue was sharper, the characters realistically flawed, and the human nature vividly captured. Here, there are only a few gems, such as Clooney’s line on the “tragedy of parenting,” where “we are only successful once we’ve made ourselves irrelevant.”

The biggest problem is that the film is too careful, too cautious. Clooney’s Kelly is too sanitized to be compelling — not cruel enough to be interesting, not kind enough to be sympathetic. Every gesture and expression feels meticulously studied and controlled, like in the awful Marriage Story (2019), losing the messy, spontaneous emotional truth that makes character-driven stories riveting.

Only the daughters show flashes of raw emotion, but even their outbursts feel misplaced. We never experience their yearning for a father, only their anger. Because Clooney’s Kelly is never cruel or volatile, their hostility reads as overwrought and unjustified. The film tells us of his absence but never makes us feel it.

Overall, Jay Kelly is too afraid to offend the very industry it seeks to critique. It wants to both romanticize and condemn Hollywood and the cult of celebrity — but ends up doing neither. The tension between cynicism and sentiment disintegrates into safe, confused storytelling. Its characters are never transparent. But the film is. It is transparent in its bid for awards prestige, ending up as a cringey piece of Oscar bait.

1 out of 5 stars

Stream on Netflix