When did George Clooney lose it?

There’s a moment in Ocean’s 11 when Danny Ocean, played by George Clooney, is sitting at a poker game and Colin Hanks slips in an ad-lib: “Is it hard to move from TV to cinema?” “Not for me,” comes Clooney’s response. And we’re off into one of his slickest, most enjoyable movies.

Actually, it hadn’t been quite so easy. Fame had come relatively late for Clooney. He’d appeared in schlocky d-movies Return of the Killer Tomatoes before his big break turned up as Doug Ross in the hugely successful hospital drama ER. Dr Ross was perfect for Clooney. He got to tilt his head and look up sexily, but at the same time he was the paediatrician, so he also healed cute kids. He wasn’t the lanky lead – played by Anthony Edwards – but he was the guy you were always waiting to see, and he paired off with raven-haired nurse Carol (Julianna Margulies).

Despite Danny Ocean’s confidence, film didn’t really know what to do with Clooney at first. He appeared in the ho-hum The Peacemaker, with Nicole Kidman pelting along with him. An old-fashioned rom-com with Michelle Pfieffer, One Fine Day, suited his old-fashioned star power, and the Tarantino-scripted vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn, made money but didn’t give him a real direction. That came with Steven Soderbergh’s Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight in 1998.

Soderbergh finally drew out the sexy from the smarm and incidentally gave Jennifer Lopez by far her best cinematic vehicle. They were dynamite as a couple, and Clooney, playing a small-time thief dogged by bad luck, showed his comedy and drama chops. Charisma, in a word. His new status as a star was quickly parlayed into work for directors such as the Coen Brothers and more Soderbergh, as well as launching a parallel gig as a director.

Clooney was as cool as money. With the Coens, he played a quartet of idiots in O Brother Where Art Thou, Burn After Reading, Intolerable Cruelty and Hail Caesar!, successfully undermining the Hollywood persona even as he brought a bigger budget with him. For Terrence Malick, his appearance in The Thin Red Line fulfilled a contractual obligation on the part of the director to include five Hollywood stars in the film and underwrite studio financing. His role is brief, but in retrospect cleverly placed: essentially the moment Hollywood takes over the second world war.

In his new film, Jay Kelly, a clip of him from Malick’s movie turns up in the finale, when Hollywood superstar actor Jay Kelly (played by Clooney) attends a celebration of his work in Italy and a showreel of his work is projected. There are clips from The Peacemaker as well, God help us. It is a telling moment. After a career of 30 years, didn’t they have enough clips?

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The casting of Clooney to play Clooney is something that needs a defter hand than Baumbach possesses. Soderbergh manages to hinge the plot of Ocean’s 12 around the postmodern joke that Danny Ocean’s wife Tess, played by Julia Roberts, looks like Julia Roberts. And the bar for Hollywood satire has been placed pretty high: from Sunset Boulevard to The Player and – more recently – Seth Rogen’s Apple TV show The Studio.

Jay Kelly is glitzy belly button fluff being thumbed out of Hollywood’s navel. It’s itchy with sentiment and its view of the general public has been informed by three decades of red carpets, bad scripts and press junkets. Managers and stars, producers and cinephiles flutter about Clooney’s starlight, but it’s La Dolce Vita in crayon. Patrick Wilson’s up-and-coming competitor to Clooney is villainous only in that he’s not Clooney.

It’s telling that Adam Sandler gets to do the most acting – not necessarily the best acting, but such distinctions are often lost – rather than Clooney. George has the emotional commitment of Nespresso.

I once attended a Clooney press conference where a man from an Italian satirical TV show stripped off and proposed marriage. The star laughed and asked security to leave the man where he was so he could think about his life decisions. Clooney always gave good press conference and great interviews, unruffled silver fox that he is, and his practical jokes are legendary.

But there was a time when he directed films like Good Night, and Good Luck and starred in Michael Clayton. Now he walks through Wolfs and Jay Kelly, barely bothering to go to wardrobe and change out of his street clothes.

Kelly is supposed to be a man who sacrificed relationships and a personal life to ambition. It’s a predicament Clooney has avoided. I get the feeling his work-life balance is pretty perfect, between tooling around the Italian countryside on his motorcycle and attending galas with his wife Amal. Good for him.

But seeing some of those performances at the end of Jay Kelly – Syriana, Solaris – I can’t help but wish his work-life balance hadn’t been so well balanced.

Jay Kelly is streaming on Netflix from December 15