Top 5 Joe Keery Movies, Ranked

Most people still picture Joe Keery with a baseball bat and a bowl of hair, defending Hawkins from the Upside Down. Fair enough. But the Steve Harrington years were just the warm-up. The TV Hulk team ranked these performances by how much Keery actually disappeared into the role — the moments where you stopped thinking about Stranger Things and started believing whoever he was playing. No personal acting awards factor into this list because none exist yet for his film work, and honestly, that makes the ranking more interesting. These are the performances that prove the potential is real, and that audiences who followed him out of Hawkins made the right call.

5. Finalmente l’alba (Finally Dawn) (2023)

Sean Lockwood is the most quietly surprising role in Keery’s filmography so far. Cast in an Italian period drama set in 1950s Rome alongside Willem Dafoe and Lily James, he plays an American actor swept into a glamorous, slightly dangerous night in the city. Critics were divided on the film’s overall ambitions, but Keery carries the wide-eyed displacement of someone who doesn’t quite belong in the world he’s stumbled into. There’s a scene where Lockwood watches the chaos around him with his hands loose at his sides and his jaw just slightly slack, like he’s calculating whether to run or stay, and Keery holds that frozen half-decision for a beat longer than you expect. That extra beat is the whole move — Lockwood never fully lands in the glamour, which keeps him feeling genuinely unmoored right through to the final scene.

4. Marmalade (2024)

Baron arrives on screen with a slippery, theatrical charm that Keery leans into hard, and it works. In this jailhouse crime-romance, his character tells a fellow inmate an elaborate story about a girl named Marmalade and a heist gone sideways, and the whole film hinges on whether you trust him. Keery plays Baron with just enough warmth to keep you on his side and just enough evasiveness to keep you guessing, and that tonal balance is harder to pull off than it looks. Critics specifically flagged his performance as the reason to watch, even when the plot mechanics got wobbly. There’s a late scene where Baron’s composure finally cracks and Keery drops his voice to almost nothing, delivering the reveal with a stillness that hits harder than any outburst could.

3. Pavements (2024)

Playing a real, living indie rock icon in a film that refuses to behave like a normal biopic is a genuinely strange assignment, and Keery commits to it fully. Director Alex Ross Perry’s experimental hybrid mixes documentary footage, staged scenes, and a fictional musical, and his version of Stephen Malkmus exists somewhere in the middle: not quite impression, not quite invention. What’s interesting is how Keery captures Malkmus’s particular brand of detached cool without making it feel like a costume. In the staged sequences, there’s a looseness to how he holds himself, a deliberate underreaction to everything around him, that feels true to the Pavement frontman’s public persona. That quality — the way Keery lets scenes breathe around him rather than pushing for a reaction — is exactly what makes the portrayal land.

2. Free Guy (2021)

Walter “Keys” McKeys is the emotional engine of Free Guy, even if Ryan Reynolds is the one dominating the marketing. Keery plays a game developer who realizes the AI he helped create has come to life, carrying the film’s real-world heart while Reynolds handles the spectacle inside the game. The chemistry between Keys and Millie (Jodie Comer) gives the story its stakes, and there’s a scene where Keys watches Guy on a monitor and the realization hits him in real time. Keery plays it with a mix of awe and guilt that lands harder than it probably should in a movie about video games. The film earned over $330 million worldwide, and he held his own in a cast that could have easily swallowed him. Supporting roles in blockbusters can disappear into the noise; this one didn’t.

1. Spree (2020)

Kurt Kunkle is the role that reframed everything. Keery plays a rideshare driver so desperate for social media fame that he starts livestreaming murders from his car, and the performance unsettles in ways nobody who knew him only from Stranger Things could have predicted. What makes it work is how specific he gets: the forced laugh when a joke doesn’t land, the eyes constantly flicking to the camera mid-conversation, the manic energy that spikes whenever the view count ticks up. Kurt comes across as someone who has watched so much online content that he’s lost the ability to distinguish performance from reality, and making that feel human rather than cartoonish is a hard needle to thread. Keery threads it — and the clearest proof is a late scene where Kurt, mid-breakdown, keeps pausing to check his thumbnail framing before he falls apart completely.