Marty Supreme: Timothee Chalamet has reached apotheosis as a new kind of movie star

Where does Marty Mauser end and Timothee Chalamet begin?

The former is the character Chalamet plays in Marty Supreme, his upcoming film about a 1950s ping pong champion cum New York street hustler with unwavering faith and confidence in his talent and the bright, shining future it should afford him.

Chalamet, an actor of clearly prodigious talent with two Oscar nominations to his name, and only just 30 years old, has thrown himself into an extremely committed press tour that parallels the intensity of his onscreen character.

In a recent interview which went viral, he told a journalist, “This is probably my best performance, and it’s been seven or eight years that I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances.

“It’s important to say it out loud because the discipline and the work ethic I’m bringing to these things, I don’t want people to take it for granted, I don’t want to take it for granted. This is really top-level shit.”

Taken at face value, this answer, and the earnestness with which it was delivered, drips with the kind of arrogance we’re never supposed to exhibit. People who appear to want something usually get smacked down.

A culture that labels such people as try-hards has a deep issue with strivers, as if even trying to stick your head above the parapet means they think they’re better than us. How dare they.

But how much of it was Chalamet? And how much of it was Chalamet playing Marty in service of promoting a movie he desperately wants people to see. Is there even a distinction anymore?

For the past 15 months since he started filming Marty Supreme, it seemed as if Chalamet never stopped role-playing his character.

He has been unrelenting in promoting the movie with an unconventional publicity campaign that has featured a bright orange Marty Supreme-emblazoned blimp hovering over the skies of Los Angeles.

During appearances, Chalamet has also been flanked by a throng of people wearing globe-sized orange heads. He’s recruited famous figures to post themselves with Marty Supreme merch, which he co-designed, and went viral for a staged Zoom marketing meeting in which he suggested that they paint the statue of liberty orange.

At the Los Angeles premiere, he and girlfriend Kylie Jenner wore co-ordinated orange outfits. He then did the same with his mum at the New York shindig.

He stood atop the Sphere in Las Vegas, staring into a camera attached to a drone as he screamed out the film’s tagline, “dream big”, while also very clearly reminding everyone the film was set for release on Christmas Day (in Australia, it’s due for release on January 22). As the camera pans out to take in all of the Sphere, you can see it’s been turned orange.

Orange, if you haven’t figured it out by now, is a significant colour for the film. Literally, it’s the colour of the custom ping pong balls Marty wants to sell. Figuratively, it’s a brash, in-your-face hue that you can’t ignore.

Chalamet can’t be ignored, he’s made sure of that.

But he isn’t doing that with the usual publicity trail stops his peers have persisted with, making cute videos that barely – or don’t – mention the movies they’re promoting.

Those other films with big-name stars including Jennifer Lawrence, Sydney Sweeney, Dwayne Johnson, Jeremy Allen White, Emma Stone and Julia Roberts have underwhelmed at the box office.

Chalamet hasn’t appeared in any “two truths and a lie” videos nor is he eating spicy chicken wings. The closest thing he’s done to an actor-on-actor chat was a live conversation with idol Adam Sandler in front of an audience.

On December 19, Marty Supreme opened in limited release in the US, playing in six cinemas in New York and Los Angeles, and made $US875,000 ($1.32 million), the highest per-screen-average in almost a decade. That bodes well for the wide release.

In every instance you’ve seen Chalamet in the past three months, he hasn’t stopped talking about Marty Supreme. On Jimmy Fallon just over a week ago, he stared straight into the camera, almost as if he’s trying out semi-subliminal messaging with the palindromic chant, “Christmas Day, Marty Supreme, dream big, Marty Supreme, Christmas Day”.

He has been a machine, but he’s selling the movie, not himself. When he is selling himself, it’s only in the context of the film. It’s also aimed squarely at the audience, and generally a younger audience at that.

Those older awards voters who will decide whether Chalamet gets an Oscar? He’s not talking to them. But surely even they will hear the unspoken message – that he’s a young actor who is doggedly trying to keep the art and commerce of cinema alive.

Even better, young people, those potential cinemagoers, are paying attention to his antics. It got to the point where some sectors of the internet became convinced that Chalamet was secretly the real identity of UK rising hip-hop artist EsDeeKid who keeps his face shielded.

Those rumours were put to rest when the actor appeared in a music video alongside EsDeeKid (yes, they were in the same room!) rapping and, of course, shouting out Marty Supreme.

This all comes at a parlous time for the theatrical business, a situation which has escalated in the last month given Netflix’s looming purchase of one of the remaining Hollywood studios, Warner Bros.

He’s not the only saviour of cinema, but he’s certainly one of them. Chalamet is only interested in making movies and for the big screen, whether that’s provocative indie arthouse films such as Bones and All or franchise-driven blockbusters including Dune and Wonka.

Asked by Vogue whether he would consider going back to TV, a medium on which even Meryl Streep, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro have played, and where he got his start on shows such as Homeland and Royal Pains, his answer was plain old “no”.

It’s not that he thinks he’s too good for TV - don’t forget he did that Apple TV ad to promote the streaming platform. It’s simply that he seems to be focused on the form, when it’s really firing, that is the pinnacle of onscreen storytelling.

Marty Supreme is that film, and not just because Chalamet called it “the one”.

A madcap drama-comedy with an unbound kineticism that matches the frenetic energy of its lead character, the Josh Safdie-directed film is a whirlwind adventure from go to stop. It never lets up because Marty Mauser doesn’t.

A brilliant balance of character-driven storytelling and propulsive plot momentum, the film is, in a word, magnificent. It’s one of the reasons cinema as an artform must be protected and nurtured.

At the centre of that is Chalamet’s performance of a young man who makes one bad choice after another, tells one lie after another, and yet you’re always on his side. We might instinctively find someone like Marty obnoxious or overwhelming, but in our heart of hearts, we admire the gumption.

That ethos of just going for it, that’s the Marty Supreme spirit, and that’s what Chalamet has been channelling. It’s refreshing in a culture where being cool means being detached and effortless.

As he put it on Jimmy Fallon, “This is a movie about sacrifice in pursuit of a dream and it’s something I can relate to deeply.

“We live in a bleak time, especially for young people, so this film is an attempt at an antidote to that. And to continue to believe in yourself, to continue to dream big, and to follow your dreams and to not take no for an answer.”

When Chalamet won the Screen Actors Guild Award in February for playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, he said in his acceptance speech, “I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats.”

At that point, he’d already wrapped filming on Marty Supreme, so it’s tempting to see it through that lens of influence.

But if you think back to his body of work since his breakthrough role in the 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, the start of the “seven or eight years” during which he has, undeniably, been doing top-level work (he does not lie), there has been a throughline in most of the lead characters he’s played.

Think about it. In the 2019 film The King, directed by Australian filmmaker David Michod, he plays William Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, who has to shed his youthful wanderings to step into the power of a monarch.

As Dylan, he has to believe in his artistry and his vision to push past his folk music, and to have the conviction to stick to it in the face of opposition. In the Dune films, he starts as a boy unsure of his inherited position to become a messianic figure as foretold in a manipulated prophecy.

Even as Willy Wonka, Chalamet embodies a young chocolatier who knows his creations surpass that of any existing establishment, and will do what it takes to bring that dream to life.

Maybe it’s a chicken or the egg thing. Was he attracted to these roles because they reflect something in him, or did he start to take on the characteristics of these people he’s played?

He has pointed to the former, when he told Vogue that Marty Mauser was “the most me I was until I had any sort of career” and that the feedback he’d gotten since he was a kid was that he was fearless.

Safdie has said that when he first started talking to the actor about Marty Supreme in 2018 he saw in Chalamet, the essence of Marty.

The important factor that underpins all this is that the Chalamet of today, whether it’s an adopted persona for the sake of getting people to see Marty Supreme, or if it’s him, is that it’s earned, he can back it up.

It’s what makes him a movie star, one of the very, very few, maybe the only, of his generation. A new kind of movie star that will do whatever it takes to get people into cinemas.

He is talented. He is committed. He takes his art seriously. But he also seems like he would be so fun to have at a party.

Marty Supreme is in cinemas on January 22