From sing-song to ping-pong: Timothée Chalamet’s supreme performance as self-serving table tennis champ

It seems such is his ubiquity, get Timothée Chalamet playing ping-pong for a couple of hours and there will be a paying audience for it. In Marty Supreme, he does just that as 1950s American table tennis champ and relentless New York hustler Marty Mauser. It’s a character very loosely based on Marty Reisman, a colourful ping-pong player of the era.

However, this is anything but a traditional sports biopic. It’s essentially a study of a contemptible but compelling character striving for the top in his field and expecting everyone to get out of his way. A tale of ugly American exceptionalism with a very pretty man going very weasel for the role. He still stands out as the film star in a movie notable for its pore-depth close-ups on faces that suggest characters from Tom Waits songs, or something from the early films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, or the Coen Brothers.

It’s delivered in a freewheeling 150 minutes by writer-director Josh Safdie. His last film, Uncut Gems, was a study in dramatic tension made with his younger brother Benny Safdie. That one starred Adam Sandler as a jeweller – and relentless New York hustler.

They’ve since gone solo, with Benny directing last year’s The Smashing Machine, a proper sports biopic about a mixed martial arts fighter, played by Dwayne Johnson in his own bid for Oscar attention.

It’s a ping-pong movie in more than one way. The table tennis scenes deliver impressive sports action with no discernible use of CGI, while those extended rallies set a rhythm to it all. Even away from the tables, the plot feels like a series of unpredictable ricochets between Mauser and every other character as he paddles his way from salesman in his uncle’s shoe shop to tournaments in London and Tokyo.

Likewise, Chalamet himself is a body in constant motion, a ball of nervous energy that can remind of a young Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino at their twitchiest.

The high regard in which Marty holds himself has long attracted Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), a childhood friend and married woman with whom he’s been having a long storage-room affair. The film’s opening credits come with that traditional allusion to an impending pregnancy – spermatozoa racing to an egg, which is possibly saying something about Marty being competitive since before he was born.

Mauser steals from the shop safe to get to a London tournament, where he opts to stay at the Ritz, rather than the digs offered, and charge the room to the event organiser. There, he manages both to interest American ink-pen magnate Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) as a sponsor and seduce his fading movie-star wife Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow in her first screen role in years). Yes, it takes quite some suspension of disbelief when it comes to Stone falling for Mauser. Especially when their first tryst involves stolen jewellery, which leads to an encore in New York.

And there are subplots, like a dognapping involving director-actor Abel Ferrara as mob guy Ezra Mishkin and rapper Tyler the Creator as Marty’s taxi-driver buddy who gets mixed up in it, that can feel like the beginnings of whole other movies and surplus to requirements.

Mauser eventually ends up in Japan, for a redemptive rematch against Koto Endo, the only player who’s ever beaten him.

The ending that comes after that is something of a soft landing for a character like Marty. But it gives Chalamet a chance to prove his character is human. It just might be the touch that ensures his prickly ping-pong player gets him the Oscar his Bob Dylan sing-song didn’t.

Rating out of five: ★★★★