Jay Kelly isn’t just about movie star narcissism—it’s an act of it as well.

Noah Baumbach’s saccharine, toothless, and cheesily meta film is headlined by George Clooney as a thinly veiled proxy for himself who suffers a crisis of conscience when a chance encounter makes him fear that he’s missed out on the most important things in life.

Straining to thread a needle so that it bittersweetly laments its A-lister’s shortcomings while nonetheless forgiving him for them, it’s a grating fiction-mirrors-reality tale—screening at the New York Film Festival ahead of its debut in theaters (Nov. 14) and on Netflix (Dec. 5)—which mistakenly assumes that the woe-is-me routines of the rich and famous are the stuff of great drama.

Jay Kelly (Clooney) is a Clooney-esque leading man who’s beloved worl

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