The actor Timothée Chalamet has become synonymous with cuddly, adorable and androgynously irresistible, even while more or less thumbing his shapely nose at any movie-star formula. Does he play himself? One hopes not. He was a creepy Laurie in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” a throughgoing louse in Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” a degenerate drug addict in “Beautiful Boy,” an arrogant Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown” and a gonzo Messiah in “Dune.” Like Leonard DiCaprio, another star who began his career as a sexually unthreatening ingenue, Chalamet has been afforded a certain freedom of expression by being cute as a button.

But he’s 29 now, and if “Marty Supreme” weren’t a kinetic, antic, disturbing and deftly executed fable of ego run amok and resurrection gone awry, it might be viewed chiefly as Chalamet’s passage into cinematic adulthood. There’s not much that’s inherently appealing about his character, Marty Mauser, loosely based on the real-life Ping-Pong virtuoso Marty Reisman. In making Mauser a narcissistic, egomaniacal, manipulative obsessive, Chalamet does a first-rate job of burying his own innate charms, though Mauser does fit neatly into the oeuvre of writer-director Josh Safdie. With his brother, Benny, Safdie has produced several first-rate movies about small-timers who may not be overtly criminal but aren’t exactly crime-averse either. 

YouTube video

In those films, “Good Times” and “Uncut Gems,” the protagonists were faced with dire circumstances, largely of their own making. In “Marty Supreme” the scope is both larger and smaller: On one hand, it’s about the literal world—of table tennis, years before the “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” of the early ‘70s. On the other, we’re dealing with the self-aggrandizement of Marty Mauser.

No one on Manhattan’s Lower East Side circa 1952 thinks Marty isn’t gifted—as a salesman. Working in the Orchard Street shoestore of his uncle Murray (Larry “Ratso” Sloman), he charms the fat-footed and uses the stock room for extreme canoodling with Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), who’s married and soon pregnant by the unenthusiastic Marty. He is far more intent on getting to the championships in London, and no pregnant girlfriend, uncle or needy mother (Fran Drescher) is going to stop him.

Someone will, eventually. But how traumatic and possibly terminal Marty’s reversal will be is what generates the tension in the story, as does the question of just how deep Marty will sink to make his dreams come true. 

The film is, on a level separate from Marty’s personal flaws and transformative crises, a sports movie. In most cases, such films provide a standard-issue hero who will win, lose, win bigger, lose bigger and be faced with doubts of ever winning again. “Marty” doesn’t conform to many of these expectations, and the drama is provided less by the electrifying Ping-Pong playing than by Marty’s efforts just to get to the table. 

There’s a bit of “The Hustler” in “Marty Supreme”: The guy with the money to finance Marty’s career (a revelatory Kevin O’Leary, the businessman host of “Shark Tank”) also demands more than Marty can give—while being unaware that his own actress wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) has been frequenting Marty’s bed. Marty and his pal Wally (Tyler, the Creator) visit local Ping-Pong games to scam locals out of their cash, but get found out, barely escape alive and wind up, with Rachel, in a cockeyed scheme that involves a dog, a bag of cash and a murderous mobster played by director Abel Ferrara.

Ferrara, Sloman, O’Leary and John Catsimatidis—who once ran for governor of New York—are just a few of the unconventional casting choices in “Marty Supreme.” (Designer Isaac Mizrahi plays a publicist; the essayist Pico Iyer has a bit part.) The main attraction, of course, is Chalamet, who is playing the kind of role that can win awards, simply because it’s such a departure from what one expects—even if this actor has been doing the unexpected all along. 

What’s predictable enough is how effortlessly Chalamet generates sympathy for Marty Mauser, who in the cold light of the final credits deserves very little of it. But such is what movie stars do.