Director: Josh Safdie

Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, Tyler Okonma, Larry “Ratso” Sloman

Set in the 50s, but audaciously soundtracked to choice 80s pop, Josh Safdie’s picture is a deliriously freewheeling, anarchic and kinetic sports picture meets screwball comedy. Chalamet is Marty Mauser, a young Jewish New Yorker who we meet in 1952, charming the customers at a shoe shop in New York’s Lower East Side. He also uses the shop, where he works for his Uncle Murray (Sloman), for sex with his married girlfriend Rachel (the excellent A’zion). He demands the money he is owed in wages from his uncle so he can go to London to play in a table tennis championship. When Uncle Murray refuses, Marty half-heartedly holds the shop up. Arriving in London, he annoys the organisers into putting him up at The Ritz. There he tries to woo a faded middle-aged actress Kay Stone (Paltrow) and cracks jokes about The Holocaust to reporters adding ‘It’s alright, I’m Jewish, I can say that’. His misadventures in ping pong take him to Paris, Sarajevo, Tangier, Cairo and ultimately Tokyo where he must face his nemesis, the Japanese champion Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi). Also in the frantic mix is a dog kidnapping – and ransom – and a scam carried out by Marty and his pal Wally (Tyler Okonma aka Tyler the Creator). The film with its propulsive energy and predominantly New York setting, and choice needle drops, has something of Scorsese about it, while the cast of supporting oddballs and granite-faced ugbugs look like something out of Fellini crossed with Warren Beatty’s ‘Dick Tracy’. Chalamet is extraordinary and like the picture, tireless. His Marty with his unwavering self-belief and lack of filter is practically a sociopath but ultimately admirable in his sheer indomitability.

David Willoughby

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