Clooney isn’t playing himself in Jay Kelly. Clooney isn’t single after a string of failed marriages the way Jay is, Clooney doesn’t have two adult daughters who are varying degrees of estranged from him, and Clooney isn’t so untethered that his only real friend is his manager, Ron (Adam Sandler). But Jay is close enough to Clooney to make you wonder at how much of the high-end existential crisis that unfolds on the screen could be the man’s own. Their names even exist in parallel, pairing the same sets of starting sounds designed to only be spoken in full. “Zhay Kelly!” the crowds in Paris murmur in excitement when they see him at a train station, a scene that recalls the story Clooney likes to tell about the time he got in a terrifying motorcycle accident in Italy in 2018, and onlookers gathered around with their phones out: “They were like: A-George Clooney!”
