Marty Mauser, the irrepressible hero of filmmaker Josh Safdie’s electrifying new movie, is rocketing toward his American dream at the speed of sound, running and racing while working every conceivable angle. It’s 1952 New York, and Marty — played with ferocious verve by Timothée Chalamet — is a table-tennis shark and aspiring world champion. He’s a classic striver ping-ponging between worlds and loyalties, between the ties that bind and a complex freedom, between community and self. His horizons seem within reach, but because life for Marty is one hurdle after another it’s also one hustle after another that takes him from the old Lower East Side to points across the globe. He’s a sensational character (inspired by a real tennis-table champ, Marty Reisman), a charmer-schemer whose ambition fuels the story in a film crammed with the kind of vivid personalities and unhomogenized faces — creased, lopsided, beautiful.

The film touches on big, weighty subjects like Jewish identity, family, community, class, assimilation and success, but it isn’t didactic and doesn’t serve up any life lessons, in the pious finger-wagging manner. Its ideas are one with its realism, with its many layers, lush textures, anarchic furor, squalid apartments, jam packed streets and tenacious, pulsing life.  Chalamet inhabits Marty fully with quicksilver emotional changes, a physically grounded performance and, crucially, a deep-veined vulnerability. Marty can be cruel, carelessly or not, but the expansiveness of his sensitivities is an argument in his favor. He’s especially unkind to Rachel (Odessa A’Zion), a childhood friend whose love he sees as a trap. Kay (Gwyneth Paltrow), by stark contrast, is a glamorous emissary from another world, and his pal, Wally (Tyler Okonma a.k.a. Tyler, the Creator), another player who Marty periodically teams up with to relieve suckers of their cash.  

Marty has drives and desires, yet his course isn’t that of the classic bootstrapping American individual. Marty has family and he has friends (however fraught), and he has the buzzing Lower East Side, that glorious hive of immigrant aspirations, struggles and victories. Yet Marty, even during his darkest, most solitary moments, is also cradled by other people and by love.