During his glittering career, George Clooney has played a casino thief, a Batman,a chain-gang convict, an assassin and a high-flying layoff artist. This fall, he's stretching even more, playing an utterly charming and gorgeous movie star. Kidding!
Reality and fiction beautifully weave in and out in “Jay Kelly,” director Noah Baumbach's love letter to Hollywood that, in other hands, could so easily have become just a love letter to Clooney.
The script by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer finds Clooney — sorry, Jay Kelly — in a sort of midlife funk. He's 60, a universally beloved, deeply earnest movie hunk who has worked his way to the top and found, well, artifice.
“My life doesn't really feel real,” he says at one point, an actor trained in pretending going meta playing an actor trained in pretending. In another scene he muses: “All my memories are movies.”
A chance meeting with an old acting partner — a brilliant Billy Crudup, whose character was betrayed by Kelly years ago — reveals some unpleasant truths. “Is there a person in there? Maybe you don’t actually exist,” he asks the star, sending Kelly on a journey of self-discovery that just so happens to lead to one of Clooney's favorite places, Italy.
Kelly's careful facade — the stories he tells about himself — soon gets chipped away. On his way up the hills of Hollywood, he apparently left some personal carnage behind. “Jay Kelly” is about those who sacrificed to get him there.
Adam Sandler and Laura Dern play Kelly's long-suffering manager and publicist, respectively, while his resentful adult daughters are portrayed by Grace Edwards and Riley Keough. Kelly, we learn, put career first and that meant walking away from things like his daughters' school recitals and making his staff miss things like their daughters’ school recitals. “He's not our family or our friend,” Dern's character screams in despair. “We're not to him what he is to us.”
You'd expect Clooney to not have to shift out of second gear for this, but he gives a soulful performance, charming enough that his Kelly seduces a trainful of strangers in Italy with his aw-shucks charisma and yet also bristles when his oldest daughter makes him confront her abandonment issues.
“Do you know how I knew you didn't want to spend time with me?” his daughter asks him, before answering in a line that will land like a gut punch with any parent: “Because you didn't spend time with me.” Another killer: “I wish you were the man I thought you were.”
This being a movie about a movie star, Baumbach and Mortimer naturally surround their hero in classic film nods, from Alfred Hitchcock to Federico Fellini, whose visuals become a touchstone, like the sight of a priest licking two ice cream cones. There are jokes made about the Method school of acting and being a Dior ambassador, but this is ultimately about mortality and life choices, with one scene actually ending in a cemetery, a little too on the nose.
Kelly melts into past vignettes like watching his own long-ago breakout drama audition and his kids' joyous household revelry. It reaches for the surreal in a mist-filled forest and finds redemption in, of course, a movie theater. A retrospective montage uses such real Clooney roles like “Combat Academy” and “Up in the Air,” further blurring the line between fact and fiction.
Clooney puts his ego on the line here, even mocking his heroic vibe when he chases a purse snatcher through a field, echoing his action roles. Even that turns out to be less than heroic. There emerges an off-putting, in-his-own-world Jay Gatsby vibe to him, alluded to by his first name and the name of one of his daughters, Daisy.
We see his cluelessness up close when he won't actually listen to his assistants or thoughtlessly tosses away a gift of a neckerchief from a dead colleague's son. He reveals his vanity when he tries to hide his age with a black Sharpie on his eyebrows.
Could the movie have hit harder at the self-involved stars we often worship? Of course. But what makes it powerful is not the Hollywood drama. This is a movie for any of us who have missed a child's school recital, asked an assistant to work late or skipped a family dinner because a client was running behind. It's about time. It's about where we choose to spend our time. First stop: “Jay Kelly.”
“Jay Kelly,” a Netflix release in theaters now that starts streaming Dec. 5, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language. Running time: 131 minutes. Three and half stars out of four.
EDS NOTE: NUDITY - Eve Hewson, left, and Riley Keough arrive at the premiere of "Jay Kelly" on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025, at The Egyptian Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio is on his latest mission to assuage nervous U.S. allies in Europe about the Trump administration’s intentions with NATO or at least put a friendlier face on whipsawing changes and uncertainty about American troop reductions.
Rubio will attend a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Sweden on Friday — the same day senior Pentagon officials are expected to brief the 32-nation alliance on plans for the U.S. military’s commitment to European defense at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.
The meeting of diplomats, which precedes a NATO leaders’ summit in Turkey in July, comes amid great uncertainty over how the war in Iran will play out and whether stalled U.S. efforts to broker an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict will resume. Resentment also still simmers on the continent over President Donald Trump’s criticism of allies and his interest in taking over Greenland, a territory of NATO ally Denmark.
Rubio has often been called on to offer a calmer, less antagonistic presence from the Trump administration at meetings like these. He has been dispatched on several such missions this year, including the Munich Security Conference in February and, more recently, to Italy, where he met with Italian officials and Pope Leo XIV after Trump criticized the American pontiff for his stances on crime and the Iran war.
On his departure to the meeting in Helsingborg, Sweden, Rubio declined to discuss any further changes to the American military presence in Europe, including a possible reduction in the number of troops that the U.S. will commit under the NATO Force Model, which is a contingency plan for European defense in the event of serious security concerns.
The Trump administration had decided to cancel the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops to Poland and Germany, but then the president posted on social media Thursday that “the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland.”
It was not clear whether that meant the brigade that had been stopped from going to Poland would be back on its way, whether additional troops beyond that rotational deployment could be added, or whether there would still be a drawdown of U.S. troops in Europe, but from a different country. The Pentagon referred requests for comment to the White House, which did not immediately respond to messages seeking clarity.
Earlier, Rubio did repeat that Trump and others in the administration, including him, are “very disappointed” in NATO, especially in its response to the Iran war.
“I don’t think anyone is shocked to know that the United States, and the president in particular, is very disappointed at NATO right now,” he told reporters in Miami before boarding his plane.
Rubio said he was a “strong supporter” of the transatlantic military alliance and called it important. But he reiterated complaints that some NATO allies, notably Spain, had refused to allow access to U.S. bases for the Iran conflict and others had been reluctant, if not resistant, to join a coalition to reopen and protect the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial oil shipping route that Iran largely has closed.
“I know why NATO is good for Europe, but why is NATO good for America?” Rubio asked rhetorically, answering his own question by referring to bases that allow the U.S. and others to project power globally. “So, when that is the key rationale for why you’re in NATO, and then you have countries like Spain denying us the use of these bases, well, then, why are you in NATO?”
Rubio noted that nearly all NATO allies agree that Iran should not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, but few, if any, stepped up when Trump said he would take action to prevent it.
“He’s not asking them to commit troops. He’s not asking them to send their fighter jets in. But they refuse to do anything, and so I think the president looks at that and says, ‘Hold on a second,’” Rubio said. “I think we were very upset about that. The president has made that very clear.”
NATO officials have downplayed the changes to U.S. troop levels in Europe, saying they have been long planned and do not come as a surprise.
Yet the announcements have blindsided some allies and came despite U.S. promises to coordinate military moves to avoid creating security gaps. Similarly, Trump's apparent change on Poland came as another surprise.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Wednesday that U.S. allies have known for a year that the Trump administration would be withdrawing some troops from Europe, and it expects “rightly, for Europe and Canada to take a bigger responsibility for the conventional defense of NATO and particularly, of course, the European part of NATO.”
Rutte said the U.S. “will stay involved” but over time could pivot resources elsewhere in the world. U.S. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, commander of both American and NATO forces in Europe, said this week that security in Europe would not be compromised but warned that allies should expect more drawdowns in the coming years.
The Trump administration has warned that Europe would have to look after its own security, including Ukraine’s, in the future.
Associated Press writer Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press before boarding his plane at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Thursday, May 21, 2026. Rubio is traveling to a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Sweden. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives with his wife Jeanette at Malmo Airport, Friday, May 22, 2026, in Malmo-Sturup, Sweden, ahead of a NATO foreign ministers meeting. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio waves as he boards a US government aircraft after concluding his two-day visit to Italy and the Vatican, at Ciampino airport in Rome, Friday, May 8, 2026. (Stefano Rellandini/Pool Photo via AP)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press before boarding his plane at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Thursday, May 21, 2026. Rubio is traveling to a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Sweden. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press before boarding his plane at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Thursday, May 21, 2026. Rubio is traveling to a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Sweden. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press before boarding his plane at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Thursday, May 21, 2026. Rubio is traveling to a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Sweden. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press before boarding his plane at Homestead Air Reserve Base, Thursday, May 21, 2026. Rubio is traveling to a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Sweden. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)
