On one of those really good New York days in late September, the writer and director Noah Baumbach was wandering the upper floors of the Whitney Museum, trying to explain what his new movie was about. This is something that Baumbach generally struggles with, perhaps because it lies so closely to his gift, which is rendering the way people lie to themselves about themselves, the way they talk around the truth. “I find it difficult to say anything kind of absolute about what I’m doing or what I’ve made,” Baumbach said.
Looking back, he said, things were often clearer. He told a story about visiting his father’s father, a painter, in Brooklyn, when Baumbach was a child. “We would go up to the top floor, which was his studio, and he would show us the new work,” Baumbach said. “As a kid I was impressed by my father, who always had things to say about them that seemed smart to me, but now I can only imagine what he was going through every time.” Baumbach winced, thinking of what it must have cost his father to play along. “My grandfather would put one up and say, ‘I think this one’s a masterpiece’ …‘I’m doing the best work in my life.’ ”
This scene made its way, close to verbatim, into 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories, in which Dustin Hoffman played a sculptor whose self-involvement and bad feelings about his own career has wrecked his relationship with his three children. Simple enough. But could Baumbach—who once told an interviewer that “I couldn’t write an autobiographical movie if I tried”—have admitted then, at the time, just how much of that film was about his father and his grandfather?
Several years ago, he remembered, while editing 2019’s Marriage Story—a film about a divorce not entirely unlike Baumbach’s own split with actor Jennifer Jason Leigh—he’d had the experience of rewatching his breakthrough, 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, a semi-autobiographical account of Baumbach’s parents’ divorce and the kids stuck in between. The Criterion Collection was reissuing the film, so Baumbach watched it in its office, in a little editing bay, and found himself weeping in front of two company employees. “I was crying for myself, that kid whose parents got divorced and went through all of that,” he said he realized. “And also I was crying for myself, the adult who went through divorce. And I was also crying because I was proud of myself.”
These feelings—of seeing yourself in your work, if only in retrospect; of the way that the work, in fact, becomes the life, sometimes to the detriment of the actual life—were, Baumbach got around to saying at the Whitney, some of what he was trying to express in his newest movie, Jay Kelly. In the film, which Baumbach cowrote with Emily Mortimer, George Clooney plays an aging movie star, surrounded by loving sycophants—including his manager, played by Adam Sandler, and his publicist, played by Laura Dern—who is forced to confront his past as an artist and a father as he chases his younger daughter around Italy via train. It’s a funny, sad movie about regret and, well, movies. What do they give you? What do they cost you?
After debuting Jay Kelly in Venice and then Telluride, Baumbach was in town for the film’s premiere at the New York Film Festival. Baumbach and his wife, Greta Gerwig, and their two young children have been living in London for most of the past few years—it’s close to where Gerwig shot Barbie, which she and Baumbach cowrote, and where she was currently shooting a new adaptation of Narnia. Baumbach still considered them, in the anxious words of the Adam Driver character in Marriage Story, “a New York family.” But their actual New York apartment was being renovated, and so Baumbach, who grew up in Brooklyn, was staying in a hotel, his fourth in three trips. “It was so weird,” he said about the experience of being in the city but not being at home. “It’s like sleeping on the wrong side of the bed or something.”
Baumbach stopped in front of an Edward Hopper painting, which prompted him to describe for me the precise location, where Greenwich Avenue meets Seventh Avenue, that supposedly inspired Nighthawks—“At least, that’s what I tell people”—and then wandered outside, onto one of the museum’s upper-floor balconies, where he once again began auditioning potential explanations for why he’d made Jay Kelly. “I might say to somebody, ‘I chose an actor and a movie star because if you make a movie about an actor, you’re making a movie about identity and about this notion of playing yourself,’ ” he said. “And that’s true, but it wasn’t why I started writing this movie. I think I’ve made a few movies about people who define themselves by the fact that they aren’t where they want to be in their lives.”
Unfinished characters, people full of resentment at their incompleteness—that’s the dad in The Squid and the Whale, also the Ben Stiller character (a proxy for Baumbach himself) in 2010’s Greenberg. The Ben Stiller character in 2014’s While We’re Young, for that matter. Even 2012’s Frances Ha—a lighter, less angry movie—was a film about a person who wasn’t quite a person yet, Baumbach said. So maybe Jay Kelly was that: “Another way of looking at that thing, of being later in life and looking and realizing that you only get to do this one way, and it’s the way you choose and how do you make peace with that? Or can you make peace with that? And these bargains we make with ourselves all through our lives, ‘I’m going to do this, but I’ll get back to that,’ or whatever the thing is.”
Or was it maybe about acceptance? One of Baumbach’s producers, David Heyman, had said that, and Baumbach liked it. In Jay Kelly, the layers of people and money that protect the character from reckoning with himself are stripped away, until he is forced to confront the person he actually is. Which reminded Baumbach in turn, again, of Greenberg, which ends with Greta Gerwig’s character cycling through voicemail messages until she gets to one left by Greenberg, who is on his own journey of self-recognition. Gerwig’s last line, which is the last line of the film is: “Okay, this is you.” Baumbach recalled a conversation he’d had with Gerwig about what it meant for the character to say that: “Greta pointed out what a nice thing that is.” Because her character sees him in a way that Greenberg cannot. “So much of his story is this sort of definition he has of himself that has not been supported by his experience in the world,” Baumbach said. “And he’s holding on stubbornly to this sort of notion of himself.”
So perhaps Jay Kelly, like all of Baumbach’s movies, was about that: that moment when you are seen, or see yourself, as you actually are, for better or for worse. Or maybe this, too, was just another instance of Baumbach being like one of his characters: telling a story because he was attached to the sound of it, or couldn’t yet imagine it being another way.
When Baumbach is in New York, he is inevitably, at some point, at Bar Pitti, where the staff unofficially reserves a table for him. This is where he and director Wes Anderson cowrote, at least in part, two of Anderson’s more acidic films, 2004’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. One afternoon, I got there before Baumbach and sat on the side of the table that faced the street, until a server gently told me I was in Baumbach’s preferred chair. When Baumbach arrived, he said in fact the ownership of the seat was something that he and Anderson often contested: “If we were meeting here, I started noticing he was getting here earlier to get the seat. So then I would try to get there earlier than he would get there earlier.”
Baumbach and I first met, briefly, 12 years ago. I wrote a story about Frances Ha for The New York Times that suggested, perhaps, that Baumbach was softening a little from the angry young filmmaker who’d made three straight character studies of abrasive, unhappy people, in Squid, 2007’s Margot at the Wedding, and Greenberg. At Bar Pitti, Baumbach said he’d reread the piece that morning and found the portrait to be sufficiently unresolved. “I felt like it was done in a more kind of…speculative way,” he said, approvingly. Like: maybe.
And he had softened, he said. Sort of. “I cry a lot now,” he said. “I find a lot of life emotional in a good way.” Why? “Aging,” he said. “But also just having children.” (Baumbach has two young sons with Gerwig, and an older son from his marriage with Leigh.) “Being with Greta,” he said. The two of them started a relationship after the making of Frances Ha, following Baumbach’s separation from Leigh. “I think with Greta and I, we really recognize each other, even though it manifests in different ways sometimes. And that helped me gain access to, like, ‘Actually, I am like that.’ She’s like, ‘I love da-da-da.’ And I’m like ‘I do too, why am I not saying I love it?’ ” He referenced a running gag in Jay Kelly, about a dessert that follows Clooney’s character around throughout the film. “Not to quote my own movie, but it’s that thing of, ‘Maybe I am someone who likes cheesecake.’ These things about yourself that you start to accept.”
Baumbach was wearing a blue jacket with his initials on it. A mushroom grew cold, suspended on a fork, as he reflected on his younger self. Baumbach was only 25 when he directed 1995’s Kicking and Screaming, which was a modest success, and just 27 when he’d made 1997’s Mr. Jealousy, but what followed was an eight-year period where Baumbach appeared to make nothing at all. Baumbach said he recently rediscovered a journal he’d kept during those years. “Reading it, the whole theme of it is: When is life going to begin? And then when I read these actual journal entries, I’m doing so much all the time. I’m just always out. It was kind of heartbreaking in a way. That thing of thinking life is somewhere else. And it was like: That all sounds kind of fun! I don’t know. I’m out every night. And I was writing stuff, but it wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing.”
He wrote a movie that didn’t get made; he wrote a lot for television, which is ironic, because perhaps the great unseen thing of Baumbach’s career is a television adaptation of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen that he wrote and directed, years later, around the time of his divorce, that was shelved by HBO. (A recent report that he was going back to television to adapt Andrew Ridker’s novel Hope was inaccurate, Baumbach said: “There’s absolutely zero truth in that.”) But mostly, he waited for his life to start.
He started going to therapy, where he talked about his parents, Jonathan Baumbach and Georgia Brown, a lot, and which in some ways he credits for what happened next, which was writing and directing The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, and Greenberg. “As I got comfortable being more honest about how I felt,” Baumbach said, “I would also then rush to everybody’s defense. I’d trash my parents for 20 minutes and then rush to their defense. ‘But they really love me.’ And at a certain point I realized I wasn’t being judged. I could just let it lie. It’s okay. Just say how you feel. And I think those movies definitely have that feeling of: I’m not going to apologize for these people.” Baumbach’s father once said in The New Yorker that the family joke was “that The Squid and the Whale was me at my worst, Margot was Georgia at her worst, and Greenberg was him at his worst,” a characterization Baumbach takes issue with, mostly because he thinks Greenberg was just him as he was at the time, without any kind of opinion attached at all.
After Greenberg, Gerwig helped put Baumbach on a different, less agonized path. Frances Ha, which they wrote together, had been a pivot point for him in more ways than one, he said—Gerwig had brought what she had brought to it, but for him the film had been about taking mercy on his younger self, having compassion for the angry person he’d been, the guy who was a filmmaker who didn’t make films. Since then, he said, he’d been happier in his life and work. Until recently, anyway.
Baumbach has trouble talking about Jay Kelly in a way that doesn’t reference the experience he had shooting the film he made immediately prior, his 2022 adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel White Noise. “I had a really hard time making it,” Baumbach said. “I was sort of like, I’m doing what I always wanted to do, and I’ve been doing it now for a while, and do I actually like doing it anymore?” White Noise is big and noisy and flat-out cinematic in a way that other Baumbach films are not; it’s got really funny jokes and sly references to Spielberg and Altman and Lynch; the performances in it are typically great. There is a line of DeLillo’s that is repeated often in the script that sometimes feels like the key to all of Baumbach’s work, which is so often about the blast field that narcissist parents leave behind: Family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. But White Noise was the biggest-budget film he’d ever made, the longest shoot, and when it came out, it did not entirely connect with audiences. Baumbach, after it was done, found himself looking for something lighter, or at least more fun to make.
Eventually, that impulse became Jay Kelly—Clooney, Sandler, Dern, Italy—but only after Baumbach did something that surprised even himself, which was to cowrite Barbie with Gerwig. That movie is so successful now that it can be hard to remember what an iffy proposition it was for a guy like Baumbach when he and Gerwig took it on.“The funny thing is I was offered Barbie in a totally different iteration, I don’t know, 10 years earlier,” Baumbach said. “I thought it was a bad idea then, and I thought it was a bad idea when it came back.” But Gerwig had a feeling about the film, he said. “And Greta has such joy and light,” Baumbach said. “It’s actually what I was saying to you: feeling like I had that light too and I’m not shining. I want to shine that light and she’s giving me permission to do it. And in a way, watching Barbie, and watching the pleasure of it—not that it didn’t involve difficulties and everything too—was inspiring to me.”
When the film came out and was a $1.4 billion box office hit, Baumbach had the surreal experience that he had only previously read about in books, of going to check on theaters and finding them overflowing with people excited to see something he’d worked on. “I’ve made movies where I got to go and see how packed the Angelika got for a weekend,” Baumbach said, referring to the art-house theater in downtown Manhattan. “But I—we—never had that experience of going from theater to theater and just seeing people having this amazing kind of Rocky Horror Picture Show experience of it.”
Baumbach recalled running into Joel Coen after Coen and his brother Ethan had won the Academy Award for Best Picture for No Country for Old Men and then, not long afterward, released True Grit, which made a bunch of money “its opening weekend or whatever. And I said, ‘How does that feel?’ And he’s like, ‘You’re in this business long enough and every weird thing happens to you.’ And I’ve now been in it long enough that some weird stuff has happened.”
Baumbach was saying all this because he thought Jay Kelly had somehow come out of all that had come before; that the glamorous locations and the comedy and the relative breeziness of the film had something to do with how heavy White Noise had felt, and how much fun he’d seen everyone have making and then actually watching Barbie.
I mentioned the fact that in Venice, where Jay Kelly debuted, critics seemed almost taken aback by Clooney’s character’s basic warmth and the film’s almost yearning quality, especially compared to the ones he’d made as a younger man.
“And when I was making those movies, people were like, ‘Why is he so hard on us?’ ” Baumbach said, sighing. “I suppose it’s inevitable that you get reviewed against yourself sometimes. That’s okay. I didn’t think of Jay Kelly as making you feel better or worse. If anything, it just felt like how the movie should feel.”
And Jay Kelly did feel a little heavier the second time I saw it. Many of Baumbach’s films are about people whose ambition is stymied, or never realized. Jay Kelly is a guy whose ambition is perhaps his most successful quality. And it’s for those around him to reckon with the void that ambition has left behind.
At Bar Pitti, Baumbach and I started talking about his father—a novelist who was perhaps less successful than he would’ve liked to be—and how, in certain ways, his dad was Baumbach’s great subject. He is there in the Jeff Daniels character, Bernard Berkman, in The Squid and the Whale, in the Dustin Hoffman character, Harold Meyerowitz, in The Meyerowitz Stories, and in a million small and large places in between. Jonathan Baumbach passed away in 2019, and there was something of him in Jay Kelly too, Baumbach said, though it took him a typical while to zero in on what that was.
First, he said, there was the experience he’d had after The Squid and the Whale, where he’d depicted his father as unfulfilled, a guy who perhaps viewed himself as a failure, and then when the movie came out, famous people would come up to Baumbach and say that they saw themselves in the character. “I would think: My father so badly wanted to be famous or successful,” Baumbach said. “I think he had a feeling that there was something almost biblical holding him back.”
After that, Baumbach said, “I wanted him to know that in a funny way, this isn’t true—what you are, or what you think you are.” Even if for a long time Baumbach himself believed it. “I believed it was true on some emotional level, not maybe expressly, but it was communicated to me.” And many of Baumbach’s movies reckon with what it’s like to be that person or the son of that person. “But then you have somebody like Jay,” Baumbach said, who “for me was a different kind of character. On the surface he is someone for whom success seems somewhat uncomplicated.”
Jay Kelly, unlike his predecessors in Baumbach’s work, is someone willing to chase after the thing he wants. “And my father would be more, take it on his terms,” Baumbach said. “Like, ‘If they’ll come into my living room, then I’ll sing for them.’ But no—you have to go over there and you’re going to knock on the door and they’re not going to let you in. And so you’re going to have to go to the window and try to climb in and then talk your way in. And then you’re going to sing. And Jay Kelly knew that on some instinctual level, but what that then did is he didn’t need to do any of the other work.” Work in this case meaning: being a father, a friend, anything but a movie star. “And the movie in some ways is life and time and memory and the experiences, people dying, the things we see happen in his life, the losses and things. If you’re lucky, then you get to confront those things.” So Jay Kelly was an experiment in a way: a character at the same pivotal, even regretful point in life, but with a very different path getting to that crossroads.
At Alice Tully Hall, where the Jay Kelly premiere was held in September, Baumbach noted from the stage that this year marked the 30th anniversary of his first appearance at the New York Film Festival, with Kicking and Screaming. Jay Kelly, he said, was his 10th film to play at the festival. “All my memories are movies,” Clooney’s character says in the film. Baumbach, in so many ways, can relate.
After the premiere, Baumbach and his cast moved to The Polo Bar, where Adam Sandler and his family sat in a corner with Lorne Michaels. Clooney put his arms around Baumbach and Dern like they were posing for a picture. Baumbach seemed a little spooked and a little bit giddy. “Seemed like it played well in there,” he said. “A lot of laughs.”
Zach Baron is GQ’s senior special projects editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of GQ with the title “Noah Baumbach’s Big Breakthrough”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Bruce Gilden
Grooming by Rheanne White at Tracey Mattingly Agency