Marty Supreme is an unstoppable, mesmerising ride

Marty Supreme is fast. Very fast.

It screeches around corners as it hurtles from victories to disasters, from hilarity to anxiety and from unpredictable point to unpredictable point for 150 minutes.

From its very first scene, the force holding the thing together is the magnetism of its protagonist.

Marty Mauser is a hustler so charming and driven that everyone he nears is pulled in; and equally so egoistical, impulsive, dishonest and unlucky that it's hard to shake the feeling he's dismantling the tracks in front of himself.

In Marty Supreme, director Josh Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein, both of Safdie brothers fame (Uncut Gems, Good Time), take us to 1952 for a comedy about a prodigiously talented player trying to battle his way to the top of the emerging world of competitive table tennis.

Except it's really the tale of a 20-something New York shoe salesman (at least for the first few minutes) and huckster so utterly convinced he is the sport's greatest star that he is willing to use everyone and everything around him to prove it.

Marty - played by Timothée Chalamet (Dune, Call Me By Your Name) - unironically and repeatedly declares himself the future of ping-pong and, at one point, "the ultimate product of Hitler's defeat".

He delivers a performance that's embodied, natural, controlled and arguably his best to date. It's impossible to look away from his palpable energy, his wildly offensive claims delivered with such believable hubris and conviction, it's hard not to laugh.

Meanwhile, the table tennis is great.

The sequences of games that frame the film - and there are not that many - are hypnotic and nail-biting, thanks in part to an unpretentious clarity and economy in the way they're shot.

But most of the idiosyncratic, zig-zagging plot is eaten up by the various cons, schemes, and grifts Mauser employs in a bid to turn ping-pong into a full-time job. He takes us through a series of ill-fated relationships, half-baked business ideas, one of the worst-thought-out dog ransom attempts ever put to film, and occasional shocking explosions of violence.

The whole thing is all wrapped in wonderfully dirty sets and cinematography. It's all a bit sweaty, a bit grimy, a bit sleazy, and very lived in. It's all set to a heavy, pulsating, synth score by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), that will feel familiar to Safdie fans, and is punctuated by a few well-placed, anachronistic pop bangers.

While recounting the plot feels like a pointless task - its first 30 minutes contain enough elements to hang two films off - Marty Supreme works, partially because the rapidly rotating cast of side characters is as perfectly pitched as Chalamet.

As Rachel Mizler, a married woman having an affair with Marty, and both his biggest victim and the person who resembles him most, Odessa A'zion (Until Dawn, Fresh Kills) is equal parts tough, hilarious and heartbreaking.

And Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love, Sliding Doors) delivers a pleasantly restrained and low-key performance as Kay Stone, a well-to-do retired Hollywood actress drawn to Marty's youthful zeal.

It's a cast of thousands, though. Fran Drescher, Tyler, the Creator, John Catsimatidis and plenty more names show up, every one of them hitting the mark.

It's a testament to Josh Safdie's spectacular control of tone in a film that could easily be a much messier, more stressful thing.

Ultimately, though, despite the seemingly doomed trajectory of its hero and its unrelenting pace, Marty Supreme is not the merciless crawl through tension of the likes of Uncut Gems.

It pulls a few of its punches - at moments, things feel like they could get no worse, it dares to lean a tad into its corniness.

As a result, it all goes down very easily.

Like its lead character, decadent runtime and propulsive plot, Marty Supreme careens past with such charm and energy that you'll be left wondering what just happened.