The opening of Noah Baumbach’s new movie, “Jay Kelly,” has his leading man, George Clooney, wrapping a scene in what appears to be a crime drama. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” Clooney says, slumped and bleeding from a bullet wound. “I want to leave this party.” Despite the whiff of farewell, Baumbach, with thirteen films and two recent career-spanning tributes to his credit, says that he’s renewed his vows with the movies.

I met Baumbach more than twenty years ago, when I plucked a Shouts & Murmurs piece he’d submitted out of the slush pile. At the time, he was writing “The Squid and the Whale,” his heartbreaking divorce comedy. We sat together at The New Yorker’s Christmas party that year and talked about breakups and custody battles. When the movie came out, I interviewed him a

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