Justin Chang

Last year, while accepting a Screen Actors Guild Award for A Complete Unknown, Timothee Chalamet told the audience, Many criticized him for his immodesty, but I found it refreshing.

After all, Chalamet has never made a secret of his ambition in his interviews or his choice of material.

In his best performances, you can see both the character and the actor pushing themselves to greatness, the way Chalamet did playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which earned him the second of two Oscar nominations.

He's widely expected to receive a third for his performance in Josh Safdie's thrilling new movie, Marty Supreme, in which Chalamet pushes himself even harder still.

Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a 23-year-old shoe salesman in 1952 New York, who dreams of being recognized as the greatest table tennis player in the world.

He's a brilliant player, but for a poor Lower East Side Jewish kid like Marty, playing brilliantly isn't enough.

Simply getting to championship tournaments in London and Tokyo will require money he doesn't have.

And so Marty, a scrappy, speedy dynamo with a silver tongue and inhuman levels of chutzpah, sets out to borrow, steal, cheat, sweet-talk, and hustle his way to the top.

He spends almost the entire movie on the run, shaking down friends and shaking off family members, hatching new scams and fleeing the folks he's already scammed, and generally trying to extricate himself from disasters of his own making.

Marty is very loosely based on the real-life table tennis pro, Marty Reisman.

But as a character, he's cut from the same cloth as the unstoppable antiheroes of Uncut Gems and Good Time, both of which Josh Safdie directed with his brother Benny.

Although Josh directed Marty Supreme's solo, the ferocious energy of his filmmaking is in line with those earlier New York nail-biters, only this time with a period setting.

Most of the story unfolds against a seedy, teeming post-war Manhattan, superbly rendered by the veteran production designer Jack Fisk as a world of shadowy game rooms and run-down apartments.

Early on, though, Marty does make his way to London, where he finagles a room at the same hotel as Kay Stone, a movie star past her 1930s prime.

She's played by Gwyneth Paltrow in a luminous and long-overdue return to the big screen.

In this scene, Marty calls Kay and worms his way into her life.

Maybe.

Marty is soon having a hot fling with Kay, even as he tries to swindle her ruthless businessman husband, Milton Rockwell, played by the Canadian entrepreneur and Shark Tank regular, Kevin O'Leary.

Marty Supreme is full of such ingenious, faintly meta bits of stunt casting that

the rascally independent filmmaker Abel Ferrara turns up as a dog-loving mobster.