Chalamet smashes it in dizzying screwball nightmare

This new film from Josh Safdie has the fanatical energy of a 149-minute ping pong rally carried out by a single player running round and round the table.

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It's a marathon sprint of gonzo calamities and uproar, a sociopath-screwball nightmare like something by Mel Brooks only in place of gags, there are detonations of bad taste, cinephile allusions, alpha cameos, frantic deal-making, racism and antisemitism, sentimental yearning and erotic adventures. It's a farcical race against time where no one needs to eat or sleep.

Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a spindly motormouth with the glasses of an intellectual, the moustache of a movie star and the physique of a tiny cartoon character. He's loosely inspired by Marty "The Needle" Reisman, a real-life US table tennis champ from the 1950s. The movie probably earns the price of admission simply with one gasp-inducing setpiece involving whippet-thin Chalamet, a dog, a bathtub, cult director Abel Ferrara in a walk-on role and a scuzzy New York hotel room.

Similarly disorientating is the climactic revelation of Chalamet's naked buttocks prior to one of the most upsetting displays of corporal punishment since Lindsay Anderson's If....