This new film from Josh Safdie has the fanatical energy of a 149-minute ping pong rally carried out by a single player running round and round the table. It’s a marathon sprint of gonzo calamities and uproar, a sociopath-screwball nightmare like something by Mel Brooks – only in place of gags, there are detonations of bad taste, cinephile allusions, alpha cameos, frantic deal-making, racism and antisemitism, sentimental yearning and erotic adventures. It’s a farcical race against time where no one needs to eat or sleep.
Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a spindly motormouth with the glasses of an intellectual, the moustache of a movie star and the physique of a tiny cartoon character (though that could just be the initials). He’s loosely inspired by Marty “The Needle” Reisman, a real-life US table tennis champ from the 1950s who was given to Bobby Riggs-type shenanigans: betting, hustling and showmanship stunts. The movie probably earns the price of admission simply with one gasp-inducing setpiece involving whippet-thin Chalamet, a dog, a bathtub, cult director Abel Ferrara in a walk-on role and a scuzzy New York hotel room. Talk about not being on firm ground. Similarly disorientating is the climactic revelation of Chalamet’s naked buttocks prior to one of the most upsetting displays of corporal punishment since Lindsay Anderson’s If….
