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 pr

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