LIFTOFF

On the eve of the release of Marty Supreme, his much-heralded new movie, Timothée Chalamet is as fearless as he's ever been, full of ideas, totally locked in. "Why not go super hard?" he asks.

- By Mattie Kahn. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

Down the hall and unbeknownst to the group of grade school girls practicing their tendus in mismatched leotards, Timothée Chalamet has spent an hour walking in circles.

He has experimented with footfalls. Tweaked the swing of his gait. Paused, reset, touched the tips of his long fingers together. Drilled this circular walk once, twice, a dozen times—until it looks effortless and unstudied. We're at a dance studio in Hell's Kitchen, the same neighborhood in which 29-year-old Chalamet grew up, and he is rehearsing for a performance that has bedeviled peers and predecessors, that can drive an actor to madness, or at least to an unforced error on late-night television: the role of leading man who must now promote his latest project.

Chalamet has devised a concept—and to be clear this is his concept—that might best be described as an acid trip of a cadet march. Welcome to the press tour for Marty Supreme: Chalamet in the center of a group of men dressed in black, each wearing a cadmium-orange-colored Ping-Pong ball the size of a classroom globe on his head.

Get used to seeing this band of pumpkin-headed foot soldiers, because Chalamet is taking them—and an album-release-like approach to Marty Supreme—on the road. The night before, he had debuted them on Instagram Live for an audience of 45,000 people to plug the movie's Christmas Day release date. The night after we meet, he will show up to a Times Square theater with the same entourage to host a sneak peek for a first-come-first-served crowd.

To be fair,