In the more tiny violin-inspiring than tearjerking Jay Kelly, George Clooney plays the eponymous character, a movie star about as famous as the silver-fox actor who portrays him. The pointedly cast Clooney’s apparent off-camera contentment is something for which the increasingly alcohol-dependent Kelly might yearn. Co-written (with actress Emily Mortimer) and directed by Noah Baumbach, the movie is a midlife crisis-tormented dramedy in which a long-divorced living legend with two grown daughters, Jessica and Daisy (Riley Keough and Grace Edwards), is getting more all-consumingly bothered by how his career-first priorities might not have been worth it. Daisy, a recent high-school graduate who loves her dad but hates the public swarms of autograph and selfie requests he faithfully obliges, is leaving the nest. And 30-something Jessica hasn’t gotten over the never-made-up-for distance that set in once Kelly and her mom divorced.

Jay Kelly mourns what could have been. It often detaches itself from its wisp of a main narrative — following Daisy as she embarks on a Europe trip with her friends and using a career-retrospective showcase in Tuscany as an excuse for the stalking — with spoon-feedingly explanatory flashbacks. There’s a swiped, but also not really, audition from a fellow-actor friend for a breakthrough part at 23; the filming of an early-career scene with an actress Kelly might have ended up with in another life (Eve Hewson). But the misty-eyed feeling Baumbach seems to want to instill in the viewer is regularly dried up by stylized silliness that comes across as slightly more downtempo screwball comedy. It can give the movie a semi-unreal archness at odds with its meant-to-be-taken-seriously descents into self-pitying melancholy.

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Photo credit: Peter Mountain/Netflix