Noah Baumbach’s latest film, Jay Kelly, opens with one of the most beautiful sequences of his career. Out of a Hadean mist of film equipment and backdrops, an urban scene gradually emerges – New York City, at night, all shot in a single take, like the opening of Robert Altman’s The Player but in an elegiac rather than sardonic key. Everything is obscurity and insubstantiality, as the moving pieces converge into what feels like the last cinematic mise-en-scene. At the heart of it is a character played by actor Jay Kelly, played by actor George Clooney, in the final noirish throes of a disillusioned death. He reflects that his heyday has passed and that he had already died, in some sense, while he was still alive. The film that ensues follows Jay Kelly as he takes a trip to Italy, his junket in tow, and even agrees to attend a tribute to his career, all for the sake of trying to meet up with his estranged daughter. Along the way, he’s forced to take account of the costs of cinematic celebrity, and to reckon with the manner in which his career has alienated him from both his children.

In other words, Jay Kelly is Baumbach’s take on what is fast becoming a major cinematic genre – the elegy for the Last Movie Star. Astonishingly, Clooney now feels closer to classical cinema – to Marlon Brando in particular – than to the present moment. His reinvention, from a laddish romantic lead in the 90s, to the sentimental humanist of the 00s, is now twenty years in the past, but a lifetime in terms of cinematic sensibilities. At one point, Jay Kelly is described as “the American Dream…the last of the old movie stars” while Jay himself has a mantra he repeats to himself before public appearances: “Gary Cooper. Cary Grant. Clark Gable. Jay Kelly.” A flashback reveals that, moments before the most significant audition of his career, he crumpled up a stately photograph of Brandon – and ate it. Radiating out from this character, and Clooney’s performances, an ensemble cast – notably Adam Sandler as manager Ron, and Laura Dern as publisher Liz – seem to be settling into their final poses, gathering and congealing themselves photographically for posterity. Conversely, Jay’s daughters – Daisy, played by Grace Edwards, who has travelled to Europe, and Jessica, played by Riley Keough, who has a career as a teacher in another city – shrink away from the image-making aura that surrounds him, anxious not to be fixed in (or by) it.

That makes for quite an unusual and mercurial – if not always memorable – performance from Clooney, as Jay alternates between the semblance of authentic immediacy and the void behind it. Some of the most powerful moments occur when Jay demonstrates uncertainty or discomfort; early in the film he meets up with an old friend, played by Billy Crudup, who challenges him: “Is there a person in there? Maybe you don’t actually exist.” That vulnerability, or just vacancy, means that Clooney finally looks old, too old to be a silver fox (“He’s not 25 anymore, he’s not even 55 anymore”), leading to lots of sequences that revolve around his most “silvery” attribute: his legendary hair. In one scene, he discusses his proportion of hair dye with daughter Daisy (“Next time, you should put more gray in”); later, we see him using a sharpie to introduce the right amount of black back into his eyebrows. The hi-def granularity of Netflix works well to bring out the wrinkles, ripples and imperfection of his skin, especially during a detailed depiction of his daily grooming routine.

What momentum the film musters comes from Jay’s effort to meet up with Daisy overseas. Having pinpointed a train she is taking, he gets on board, entourage in tow, and is immediately greeted by a sea of loving and adoring fans. The fact that this occurs in Italy operates as throwback to the Fellini-esque sense of directorial decadence and surreal New Wave odysseys of the American film industry that Baumbach draws upon in the middle part of the film. As this picaresque, cinematic junta make their Grand Tour across Europe, Baumbach also draws on the primal modernist analogy between train and screen, turning the engine and carriages into a cipher for the Last Film as Kelly enacts, inhabits and mourns it against the Italian countryside. In doing so he encounters an antiquated cinematic public who treat him like royalty, evoking an intimacy and affection between celebrity and fandom that has largely vanished in the modern parasocial era. Whereas parasociality depends upon the illusion and fantasy of reciprocity, classical cinematic celebrity was dependent upon the otherness of the actor, the unidirectional nature of the fan relationship. For all that Jay insists that “I want to play people – I need to meet people,” his connection to this adoring public is always that of a monarch beneficently bestowing his charm on the common man.

The thing is, that this unidirectional celebrity relationship also has a dark side, even a narcissistic side, and the train journey leans into this angle as well. At first, Jay’s sheer charisma creates classical cinematic arcs around him, as when Ron and Liz fall into each others’ arms, and recall the time they met at the Eiffel Tower, when Ron presented a ring to her in a chocolate ganache – in other words, the ultimate romcom cliché. Yet while Jay’s aura on the train transports them back into this cinematic moment in their early life, we learn that Liz refused Ron and that she did so precisely because of Jay’s demands on their time: “It was like a very romantic movie but one that wasn’t romantic at all, because you never came back.” In fact, the more they reflect on the situation, the more Liz realises that “He’s not our family or our friend – we’re not to him what he is to us.” That unidirectional allure, so powerful when it’s directed at the public, is dehumanising when directed at the people in Jay’s inner circle, especially his daughters, as Jess attests in a devastating phone conversation just before he accepts his tribute. As dusk settles over the train, then, it takes on a Lethean quality, in which Jay has no memory of himself, except through his roles, meaning he is only real, to himself, when communing with his public, rather than his family, because he can only “connect” with people from the lofty distance of the cinematic screen.

Two moments on the train encapsulate this quite beautifully. In the first, Jay plants himself down opposite Grace and her friends and regales them with his charisma, as the train windows create rhythmic shadows on his face, giving the impression of sprockets on a feel reel. For all his apparent authenticity, his expressions periodically give way to utter blackness, evoking the void of his inability to relate to his daughter except as a peculiarly intimate member of his public. In the second moment, a passenger snatches a woman’s purse, someone pulls the emergency brake, and Jay chases the perpetrator across the field as the remaining travellers watch from the windows, completing Baumbach’s nostalgic-modernist convergence of train and cinema screen. Yet this “escape” from his train-allure turns out to be just another performance, the passengers commending him as a “hero” even as the thief turns out to be mentally impaired, rather than genuinely malicious, taking the edge off Jay’s heroism in the process. With “reality” transformed into yet another performance, Jay can only drift further into this Lethean mist, as he asks “what is forever?”

The final note, then, is an ambivalent elegy for the one-way celebrity relationship; the film star who is beyond all accountability to his family and colleagues; and the ways that movies democratically raised individuals to royalty, with all the paradox – all the venality and sublimity – that entails. Unfortunately, for all Baumbach’s amazingly elegiac turns of phrase (“All my memories are movies – that’s what movies are for us, pieces of time”), Jay Kelly turns mawkish and saccharine for long stretches of its running time, precisely because it never quite decides where it stands on the kind of celebrity Jay represents. It doesn’t help that, for all Ron and Liz are forced to choose between Jay and their family (and for all Jay chooses his career over his own family), the film is suffused with a nepotistic, insider-y fusion of career and family, a career-family that encompasses Greta Gerwig in a placeholder role and Sandler’s daughter, who is given considerable screen time early on. That cloying insularity means that the film often veers into Baumbach’s worst register – the whining of the ultra-privileged – and for me was this enough to relegate it to his lesser and minor works, despite the interesting, affectionate manifesto of cinema that subsisted at its core.