By Owen Gleiberman

According To The variety Is the hero of “Marty Supreme” likable? I think he is, and for reasons that include the fact that he’s a scoundrel. (Has there ever been a likable scoundrel in movies? No! Not Once!) The number-one reason we like — or, at least, I like — Marty Mauser is, of course, that he’s played by Timothée Chalamet, the most charismatic movie star of his generation. Chalamet, like Dustin Hoffman or Julia Roberts or Brad Pitt, has the X factor, a quality that draws us to him regardless of what he does. (Just look at some of those outfits he wore on the red carpet when he was becoming a star. Without the X factor, those clothes would have looked postmodern gaudy ridiculous; with the X factor, they still sometimes did, but they became…defining. In sporting those clothes, he shifted the whole culture.)

In “Marty Supreme,” Chalamet’s Marty is a 23-year-old Ping-Pong wizard who’s a total selfish monomaniac, and not without good cause. The year is 1952, and Marty thinks he’s the greatest table-tennis player in the world. From what we can see, he may well be. The Ping-Pong matches in “Marty Supreme” are more exciting than the car races in “F1” or the fight scenes in 49 out of 50 boxing movies. They’re existential ballets of whirling spinning back-and-forth high-flying no-he-didn’t-just-do-that! action. The challenge that confronts Marty is this: How can he get the world to witness his skill? He keeps having to scrape up money to attend international tournaments, and since he has no money, that means that he has to lie, cheat, steal, gamble, hustle, seduce, manipulate, and at one point find the will to endure a heavy round of corporal-punishment-by-Ping-Pong-paddle. Through all of this, he treats everyone around him, including his pregnant girlfriend, like they don’t matter. He acts like a textbook sociopath, and maybe he is one.

But if that’s the case, he’s a sociopath with a dream. Marty doesn’t merely want to succeed; he doesn’t just want to win. He wants to change the karma of his life, which means building a castle in the air atop the rickety-to-nonexistent foundation of his background as a poor Jewish kid from the Lower East Side. The way Chalamet plays Marty, with a come-hither smirk, eyes that are clear and fun-loving and burningly alive, and a motormouth that won’t quit, he’s a kid who never stops hustling and deceiving, but all because he knows that his hustles are going to add up to something greater than the sum of their deceptions. They’re going to take him to the next level. They’re going to allow him to transcendAnd here’s the point. Unless he does all this, he will not transcend. He will fail. So it’s not just that he’s a charming duplicitous hustler sociopath. It’s that life has called upon him to be a charming duplicitous hustler sociopath. He fulfills his destiny by making it up as he goes along, and by being utterly ruthless in the journey.

Marty is what we used to call an antihero: a character we identify with and root for, even though he has many qualities that are less than heroic. You remember antiheroes, don’t you? They were at the center of so many of those movies from the 1970s that everyone says they love so much — the movies “you couldn’t make today.” But that morally ambiguous good-bad quality of Marty Mauser has ruffled some feathers in our age of holier-if-not-hipper-than-thou puritanical judgment, where everyone is so busy trying to righteously one-up everyone else. Marty has been declared, within a certain swath of social media, to be a poor role model. He’s too selfish, too aggro, too entitled, too toxic…too dislikable. Is this an organic expression of distaste, or is it part of the movie’s Oscar Take-Down Campaign? Maybe both. Either way, it’s enough to make you wonder if we’re witnessing a 21st-century revival of the Legion of Decency.

Or maybe it’s a revival of that fabled Hollywood figure: the corrupt 1980s studio executive, the one who was so wired into test screenings that he couldn’t let a moment of bad behavior slide by without asking, “But will the audience like that?” Have we completely forgotten that movies — and movie heroes — aren’t always supposed to be likable or nice, that they’re supposed to have rough edges and sometimes look as flawed as most of us are? Or even more so?

That dynamic has always been an integral part of movies, and that’s why movies have always been controversial. They don’t just depict sin — they celebrate it. The gangster films of the early ’30s, like “The Public Enemy” and “Scarface,” asked people to identity with depraved killers, which was quite a radical stance for the early 20th century. But audiences were ready to embrace something radical, because they had been disillusioned by life (the Depression was all around them), and Hollywood, from the start, was about giving voice to the inner urges of the dispossessed. Was it “responsible” to ask viewers to identity with James Cagney, in “The Public Enemy,” smooshing a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face, or Paul Muni in “Scarface” shooting up the works with a Thompson submachine gun? The question answers itself. Of course it wasn’t. But it was liberating, precisely because it wasn’t responsible. That’s why movies are such a beautifully dangerous art form.

So here we are 100 years later, living in a culture that’s more liberated and unhinged than anything the citizens of the 1930s could have dreamed of. We’re now a nation of addicts and sensationalists; our mainstream entertainment (the extreme horror films, the TikTok fashion-porn videos) flirts, on a daily basis, with depravity. And here is Josh Safdie, the brilliant director of “Marty Supreme,” making a movie that’s linked in many ways to “Uncut Gems,” the landmark 2019 thriller he co-directed with his brother Benny, starring Adam Sandler as a degenerate gambler (a character all but ruled by his dislikable qualities). “Marty Supreme” is like “Uncut Gems” remade as a follow-your-dream crowd-pleaser. Yet this is a movie, and a movie hero, that the forces of performative virtue have somehow deemed…not moral and upstanding enough!

If you look closely, though, he really is. That’s the film’s — and Chalamet’s — extraordinary triumph. A movie star’s charisma is more than magnetism or sex appeal or “likability.” It’s a kind of spiritual-moral power, a force that bends those of us in the audience toward the actor who has it. Staring up at the big screen, we chime with that person, responding to their very being. We’re drawn into the flow of their action and motivation, into the essential trigger of why they do what they do. In “Marty Supreme,” Timothée Chalamet doesn’t just play a sociopathic scoundrel. He shows us what it looks like when you’ve steeled yourself to triumph over a life that’s going to throw you another stumbling block every minute, that’s going to make you jump through hoops to find your new self. And when Marty finally does, collapsing on the floor in exhilarated exhaustion after a table-tennis showdown because he has finally turned destiny around, you want to applaud how much this devotedly selfish, spectacularly flawed character has become all of us, because all he really wanted was to be happy. To be the supreme version of himself.