It goes without saying that a person who is or was a famous millionaire is unlikely to elicit sympathy, but sometimes such individuals can break our hearts, despite our prejudices against them. 

On the strength of his stellar new Hollywood drama, Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach understands this irony better than most. The movie, which debuted on Netflix on Dec. 5 following a brief theatrical run, centers on a movie star around whom minions, handlers, and advisers flit as though he is still a consequential figure. Against such appearances, 60-year-old Jay Kelly (George Clooney, doing unusually sensitive and soulful work) is persuaded that he is friendless, worries that he has been a derelict father to his grown daughters, and is sent into a post-midlife midlife crisis upon learning of the demise of the director who launched him to stardom.

The last event is not only the firmament against which the story unfolds but almost unquestionably the entry point for Baumbach, who, between Marriage Story (2019), White Noise (2022), and this film, suddenly looks like one of America’s most ambitious and assured filmmakers. In the film’s first scenes, Jay is made aware of the death of, and remembers in a lovely extended flashback, the director in question, Peter Schneider. Played by Jim Broadbent, Schneider shares the first name, an erudite disposition, and a penchant for fashionable neckwear with the director Peter Bogdanovich, who died in 2022. For at least 25 years, Baumbach was a supporter and something of an encourager of Bogdanovich, who, by the time they met, had fallen from the heights of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon into a morass of failed projects, financial insecurity, and periodic desperation. He also had enduring reserves of charm and courage.