Timothée Chalamet is an annoying twerp. That’s just a fact. Or, it’s at least been a fact for the past ten or so months of self-aggrandizing PR stunts, as he’s brought a style of hype & bravado to the film marketing business that’s usually only heard from rappers & athletes. During a SAG Awards speech earlier this year—where he won a statue for headlining a cookie-cutter Bob Dylan biopic—he declared that he is currently “in pursuit of greatness” as an actor, citing Michaels Jordan & Phelps among his professional inspirations alongside more relevant luminaries like Daniel Day-Lewis & Marlon Brando. His announced ambitions are the loud, brash ramblings of a twentysomething bro who hasn’t yet been slapped back down to Earth by the limitations of his talents & life, an inevitability eagerly anticipated by all of the pasty movie-nerd cynics watching from home. While annoying, however, there is an undeniable charm to the little twerp, who can worm his way into your heart with the slightest “Ain’t I a stinker?” smirk. Has his year-long campaign to dominate The Movie Business the same way Michael Jordan dominated the basketball court been a sarcastic bit, or is he totally sincere in his rejection of actors’ usual put-on airs of professional humility? I can’t say for sure, but if it’s all been a long-form viral marketing campaign for his new starring role in Marty Supreme, then he might be on the most genius self-promotion run in the history of the artform.

The titular Marty is a twentysomething ping-pong player who honed his craft by hustling tables in 1950s New York City, based loosely on real-life table tennis showboat Marty Reisman. Marty is a scrawny twerp possessed with the self-driven mission to prove that he is the greatest ping-pong player in the entire world. All signs point to it being time to put that dream aside and settle down, get a real job, and build a home life with the woman he just got pregnant behind her husband’s back (Odessa A’zion, the only supporting player who manages to keep up with Chalamet’s manic energy). Unfortunately, none of those practicalities will penetrate his thick skull until he can prove his dominance in the sport, despite the fact that ping-pong is not especially popular, profitable, or respectable outside a few niche international circles that he cannot afford to reach by plane. So, he acts like a petulant child until he gets his way, getting both literally and figuratively spanked for his brattish misbehavior as the Bad Wittle Boy of Table Tennis until he achieves a self-determined marker of victory. Then, his ambitions lift like a curse and he can start to see other people in his small orbit as human beings, not just boardgame pieces to move around in his “pursuit of greatness.” It’s an incredibly disgusting, energizing performance from Chalamet, who nails every beat in building up Marty “Supreme” Mauser as one of cinema’s greatest attractive-repulsive antiheroes. For his sake, I hope he wins an Oscar for it, freeing him from his own curse of professional ambitions so he can calm the fuck down and we can all catch a breath.

Structurally, Marty Supreme is not especially surprising for anyone who’s seen Josh Safdie’s previous directorial efforts. Like Adam Sandler & Robert Pattinson’s pieces-of-shit protagonists in Uncut Gems & Good Time, Chalamet spends the entire film hustling every single person he runs into in desperate bids to fund his own selfish gambles. The only difference here is a matter of genre, leaving the audience more satisfied with the built-in payoffs of a sports drama than the grim, end-of-the-line letdowns of Safdie’s previous works. Bona-fide celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, and Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary mix with first-time no-namers who appear to have been cast at the corner bodega, overloading the screen with a surplus of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero — another Safdie trademark. Third-time collaborator Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) returns to deliver another dizzying synth soundtrack, this time mixed in with a coke-fueled 1980s mixtape that disorients the audience within the 1950s setting. There’s an escalation of surrealism here in momentary tangents involving falling bathtubs, licked honey, vampires, The Harlem Globetrotters, and a seminal opening credits sequence borrowed wholesale from Amy Heckerling. Overall, though, Safdie mostly sticks to the formula that’s been earning him bigger acclaim every picture (as opposed to his brother Benny, who went out on a limb with his own sports drama this year, to lesser success). So, all of the novelty and spectacle on this outing belong to Chalamet and Chalamet alone, as he seeks to dominate this movie in every scene and, by extension, all movies for all of time. I wish him all the best, meaning I hope he eventually gives it a rest.

-Brandon Ledet