Billy Crudup STEALS Jay Kelly. Walks off with the entire picture in a handful of scenes. The problem is what he’s stealing it from.

Noah Baumbach’s latest, co-written with Emily Mortimer, stars George Clooney as Jay Kelly, a world-famous aging movie star drifting across Europe toward a career tribute in Tuscany, reflecting on the roles he played and the life he maybe didn’t. Adam Sandler is Ron, his devoted longtime manager, along for the ride with Laura Dern’s publicist while quietly absorbing decades of being needed but never quite seen. It’s a movie about an actor looking backward, made by a filmmaker who seems to be doing the same thing, and only one of those reflections works.

Crudup is the proof of what this could have been. He turns up as a figure from Jay’s acting-class past carrying thirty years of resentment, and for one confrontation the movie becomes electric, funny and mean and horribly specific, classic Baumbach, the guy whose people talk like knives. Every second he’s on screen I kept thinking the same thing: this is the movie. Not Jay gazing at his own reflection. The wreckage in the mirror. A version of this story told from Crudup’s character’s perspective, or even Ron’s, someone standing in the shadow of fame rather than bathing in it, would have had actual teeth.

Instead we get life’s-reflection mode, and it’s soft. Memories staged like little films, a train gliding through Europe, everything gauzy with self-forgiveness. And I say this next part with genuine pain, because I love Adam Sandler: Ron kinda annoyed me. The performance is pitched at maximum wounded devotion and the script keeps underlining it, scene after scene hitting the same please-see-me beat, until a character built to break my heart started testing my patience instead. That’s not really on Sandler, who commits completely. It’s on a movie that mistakes repetition for depth.

Which gets at my bigger worry. This is an overproduced Baumbach picture, gliding and gorgeous and weirdly frictionless, and it has me nervous about the shadow of a filmmaker with too much control. The Baumbach I love thrives on limitation, on cramped rooms and arguments and people who can’t escape each other. Hand him movie stars, European vistas and an apparently unlimited budget, and the specificity that made Marriage Story and The Meyerowitz Stories cut so deep gets sanded into something closer to a luxury product about regret. Clooney is perfectly fine interrogating his own myth. But a movie about an actor wondering whether he ever showed anyone his true self shouldn’t feel this insulated from its own.

Baumbach made a film about a man with too much success losing the thread. He might be closer to his subject than he thinks. [C+]