In "Jay Kelly," beloved, super-famous movie star George Clooney plays Jay Kelly, a beloved, super-famous movie star. Jeez, talk about typecasting.

"Jay Kelly" is not a thinly veiled Clooney biopic, but in at least one sense, the character is modeled so closely after Clooney that when Kelly receives a career tribute to his work, we see a clip reel not of Kelly's fictional movie roles, but of Clooney's big screen greatest hits, from "Ocean's Eleven" to "Michael Clayton."

Writer-director Noah Baumbach is doing more than paying tribute to Clooney's iconography, however. He's seeking to interrogate the soul of an on-screen superstar, but in that sense, "Jay Kelly" comes up woefully short: Rather than digging deep into its main character's psyche, Baumbach's comic-drama plays out as a shallow

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