Jay Kelly (2025, Noah Baumbach)

49/100

Crippled by rampant phoniness, plus some surprising ineptitude. I don’t blame Billy Crudup, who salvages that scene as best he can from beneath a singularly unflattering haircut, but the whole “Now I’ll drop the mask and reveal how much I despise and resent you” thing, following a prolonged period of feigned flattery/obsequiousness, never ever plays for me—it’s a cheap gotcha that instantly detaches the scenario from any emotional reality. And here it’s quickly followed by a Wild Strawberries*-style flashback memory that needlessly shows us the alleged betrayal that we’d just heard described in considerable detail! The maxim’s “show, don’t tell,” not “tell, then show.” (If we’re meant to see that Jay in fact didn’t behave unethically, it comes across as narcissistic self-justification and I like it even less. But at least it has a discernible function in that case.) By the time Jay’s valiantly chasing a dude who for some reason thought it worthwhile to steal one random lady’s handbag and then stop a train to flee in the middle of nowhere (which gets hand-waved away with a line about him being off his meds), I was consumed with thoughts about how much sharper even minor vintage Hong (to say nothing of a Turning Gate or a Right Now, Wrong Then) is by comparison. Jay Kelly does, however, work reasonably well as a star-manager bromance, and the rapprochement that sees Ron silently do Jay’s makeup (which involves Sharpie-ing the gray from his eyebrows and adding pepper to the pure salt at his temples, so that he looks believably a bit younger rather than what used to be Travolta Ludicrous) was lovely enough to make me a bit more forgiving. “You’re a friend who takes 15% of my income” isn’t a dynamic I’d previously seen explored; wish more time had been devoted to that, less to the lingering mutual regret between Ron and Laura Dern’s publicist (meaning the publicist in this film who’s played by Laura Dern, not Dern’s actual real-life publicist, identity unknown to me). Oh, and I confess to getting choked up a bit by the Kelly & Kelly Show, with its repeated cries of “Dad, you’re gonna miss it!” Handles that better than Sentimental Value, anyway! [ducks]

* A friend who saw Jay Kelly at NYFF dubbed it Mild Strawberries, which is 💋.