Entertainment

The Black Keys on the L.A. hangout that led to their funky new album

Published

2 years ago

April 9, 2024

The Black Keys on the L.A. hangout that led to their funky new album

Twenty-four hours or so before the release of their new album, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney of the Black Keys are sipping old fashioneds at the Chateau Marmont as they reminisce about the days when the two of them ran a lawn-mowing business with one lawnmower between them.

“And one weed whacker,” Carney says.

“One lawnmower and one weed whacker,” Auerbach confirms. “And one gas canister. All in the same minivan we used for gigs. So all of our s— smelled like gasoline and grass clippings all the time.”

This was in the early 2000s, when they formed this once-scuzzy blues-rock duo in their shared hometown of Akron, Ohio — Auerbach on guitar and vocals, Carney on drums — and immediately began playing every deserted bar they could.

Two decades later, the Black Keys’ lives are very different, with four Grammy Awards, a pair of double-platinum albums and, thanks to Carney’s colorful marriage to singer-songwriter Michelle Branch, a level of tabloid scrutiny the members never even thought to dread back in Akron. (More on that marriage in a minute.)

On this recent evening, Carney, 43, and Auerbach, 44, have returned to the Chateau after a day of hand shaking and meeting taking while in town from Nashville, where they both live, to promote their latest LP, which somehow has only now used the title “Ohio Players.” Earlier they had lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel with their manager of 2½ years, Irving Azoff, whose other famous clients include the Eagles, U2 and Jon Bon Jovi.

“We’d never been there in all our years of coming to L.A.,” Carney says. “That exterior is amazing, and everything else was terrible. But I think that sums up Beverly Hills.” He looks around the dimly lighted lounge. “This is more our steez. The thing about the Chateau is that it’s so classy but the rooms kind of look exactly like an apartment I had in Akron.”

Indeed, for all their success — at one point, Carney mentions that pandemic shutdowns wiped out $20 million of Black Keys concert income in 2020 — there’s something about the band’s current situation that evokes the Black Keys’ busy first chapter, when they dropped four studio albums in just over four years. Having seriously burned out on the road, the duo went dormant in August 2015 and didn’t play a show again until September 2019; since reuniting, they’ve been on a creative tear, releasing another four LPs, including “Ohio Players,” their 12th overall.

Says Dan the Automator, the veteran hip-hop producer who was among the band’s many collaborators on the new album: “They’re cranking together right now.”

The novelty this time is that they seem to be enjoying it. The Black Keys’ liveliest effort since 2011’s hook-jammed “El Camino” (which drew a Grammy nomination for album of the year), “Ohio Players” is a loose and funky party record with catchy choruses and chewy grooves and guest appearances by the likes of Beck, Juicy J and Oasis’ Noel Gallagher. The album’s freewheeling vibe — think Beck’s “Odelay” meets the soundtrack of “Rushmore” — was inspired in part by the band’s so-called record hangs in which Carney and Auerbach haul their collection of vintage 45s to a bar and DJ late into the night; to make the album, they ventured from Nashville, where they typically record at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studio, to work in rooms in London and Los Angeles.

“Honestly, we weren’t doing anything financially smart if we were trying to make money,” Carney says, recalling long stays at the Chateau and what he called its London equivalent, the Chiltern Firehouse. “But it wasn’t about that. It was about trying to maximize the experience.”

They so maximized it that “Ohio Players” almost ended up a double album, according to Carney, at least until he and Auerbach thought better of that idea. “There’s been a couple bands that have released very long albums recently that are complete garbage,” he says. “I’m not gonna name names, but there was one that had like 40 f— songs. Dan and I realized we didn’t want anything to do with making a pile of s—.”

Though the Black Keys broke out as a scrappy two-piece, they went into “Ohio Players” eager to “flex our Rolodex,” as Carney puts it. “There’s a lot of features in rap, but in rock these days there’s very little of it,” the drummer says — a shift from the late ’60s, he adds, when “Clapton would jump on a Beatles record or whatever.” For Auerbach, the collaborations — other musicians on the record include rapper Lil Noid, Leon Michels on saxophone and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin — were a way to add fresh wrinkles to the band’s established sound just as a new documentary heralds the approach of legacy-act status.

“I think it was important to us to release a new album at the same time as the movie,” Auerbach says of director Jeff Dupre’s “This Is a Film About the Black Keys,” which premiered at last month’s South by Southwest festival in Austin. “But also, we wouldn’t have been able to do this kind of collaborating when we started, or even 10 years ago,” the singer adds. “It’s really only now that Pat and I are confident enough to sit in a room and let something unfold without getting in the way.”

At the top of their wish list of accomplices, both men say, was Beck, who ended up performing on half of “Ohio Players’” 14 tracks, including the swaggering “Beautiful People (Stay High)” and “Paper Crown,” a fuzzy rap-rock-soul mash-up that also features a verse by Juicy J of Memphis’ pioneering Three 6 Mafia. Carney remembers wearing out a copy of “Odelay” as a teenager while on a family road trip from Akron to Washington, D.C.; Auerbach singles out “One Foot in the Grave,” Beck’s 1994 album of lo-fi folk songs, as a formative influence. “The way he bridged the gap as this guy who was on MTV but who was playing these Mississippi John Hurt-style songs — I was just like, Oh s—, I understand this,” Auerbach says of Beck, whom the Black Keys have known since he invited the band on the road as an opening act in 2003.

Almost as crucial as hooking up with Beck was doing it in L.A., which Carney describes as “a place that’s very conducive to creativity for us.” He lived with Branch in Toluca Lake for about a year when they got together around 2015, and he quickly “fell in love with the Valley”; these days he’s partial to the scene in West Hollywood, which offers “a culture we don’t have in Nashville,” he says. “When we’re home, I’m just watching football with my friends. But when we’re here, we’re, like, rubbing shoulders with Jason Momoa.”

The cover of the Black Keys’ “Ohio Players.”

(Easy Eye Sound / Nonesuch Records)

The Black Keys initially set up at North Hollywood’s historic Valentine Recording Studios, where Bing Crosby and the Beach Boys once worked. “That was great because it feels like you’re in your grandparents’ basement,” Carney says. “But they were adamant that there was to be no weed smoking in the control room, which was a deal breaker.” They eventually relocated to Hollywood’s Sunset Sound, a familiar setting after the six weeks they spent there making 2014’s “Turn Blue” with producer Danger Mouse.

To get Gallagher in the mix, the Black Keys agreed to go to the Oasis guitarist in London — “which was a big deal,” Carney says, “because I hadn’t gotten Dan to leave the country since 2015.” Auerbach was playing in Paris with his side project the Arcs the night of that year’s horrific terrorist attack that killed 90 people at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theater. “Definitely made me a little leery of wanting to travel for a while,” Auerbach says now. “Subconsciously, I knew we had to get back, so I thought this was a great way to do it without the pressure of a tour.”

With Gallagher, the band wrote three songs in three days, including “On the Game,” a stately ballad with Beatlesque guitars that feels lush yet proudly hand-played. Carney says it’s that slightly sloppy quality that attracts listeners to the Black Keys’ music — and not just to theirs. “I think that’s why Mac DeMarco is so popular,” he says of the scruffy indie-rock crooner. “You can smell the realness. Or this new Waxahatchee record. I don’t hear big hits but I hear something you can really get a hold of.” He laughs. “A lot of that kind of stuff misses the mark because it just takes one person in the room who wants to straighten something out to ruin it.”

One of “Ohio Players’” appealing kinks comes in “Candy and Her Friends,” where a crisp psych-rock tune suddenly slows to a half-time lurch with the entrance of Lil Noid, an underground Memphis rapper whose mid-’90s “Paranoid Funk” cassette has been a favorite of Auerbach’s since he discovered it on YouTube. “We were listening to it in the car one night in L.A. on the way back to the Chateau,” Auerbach says. “And then we were just like, ‘I wonder what Lil Noid is up to?’ We looked him up and he was in Memphis, just down the road from us in Nashville. So we invited him to the studio.”

“Dan is a genuine lover of hip-hop,” says Dan the Automator, who’s known for his work with Kool Keith, Prince Paul and Del the Funky Homosapien, among other acts. “I mean, he’s into some regional stuff that I’m not even really up on.”

Auerbach equates the rawness of “Paranoid Funk” to that of records by Hasil Adkins, the rockabilly oddball who garnered a cult following in the ’80s and ’90s. “Pure folk art,” he calls the kind of music he’s drawn to. But of course, it’s been years since the Black Keys themselves could be considered anything close to outsiders. The night after our drinks, the band celebrates the release of “Ohio Players” (whose cover photo was shot in a bowling alley) with an invite-only gig at Highland Park Bowl filled with contest winners and music-industry types; also there dancing near the makeshift stage is Branch, with whom Carney reconciled after a messy 2022 incident in which she accused the drummer of cheating on her — in a tweet, no less — then was arrested on a domestic assault charge for slapping Carney.

Is the price of having a hit—

“We haven’t had one,” Carney interrupts back at the Chateau, which is certainly untrue given that five of the band’s songs have topped Billboard’s alternative airplay chart. So is the price of having a hit that you have to accept becoming a celebrity of some sort, with all the attention on your private life that that role entails?

“People are interested in stuff where they don’t know what’s going on,” Carney says. “And I get where the intrigue comes from. The thing is, being in a marriage is hard. I was actually just talking to my therapist about this. I was like, ‘Here’s the truth about marriage: I don’t know one that I can use as a reference that’s not unconventional or a little bit f— up.’ So whatever this is supposed to be, it’s gonna have to be its own model.”

As Carney speaks, Auerbach nods with what looks like recognition. His ex-wife is interviewed in the Black Keys doc and speaks frankly about his shortcomings as a partner. “Squirmworthy” is the word he uses to describe the experience of watching the film. “I’m glad I don’t have to watch it again,” he says. Then again, the movie recounts one of Auerbach’s most cherished experiences, when he traveled as an 18-year-old to rural Mississippi and jammed with another pure folk artist: the bluesman T-Model Ford. There’s a picture from that day that shows Auerbach, a high school sports star from a solidly middle-class upbringing, sitting in the scrubby yard outside Ford’s double-wide trailer home.

Asked how the encounter shaped his youthful conception of the musician’s existence, he says, “I didn’t see any of it like that. I didn’t think about quality of life. I just thought, I’m sitting across from the coolest person I’ve ever met, and he loves my playing. Nothing else mattered.”

And now? What would the Black Keys say if someone could guarantee they could make whatever music they wanted for the rest of their lives but only if they traded the rock star trappings for Ford’s more meager circumstances?

“Depends,” Auerbach says. “Where’s that double-wide at?”

Movie Reviews

Movie Review – The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)

Published

7 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

The Testament of Ann Lee, 2025.

Directed by Mona Fastvold.
Starring Amanda Seyfried, Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie, Matthew Beard, Christopher Abbott, David Cale, Stacy Martin, Scott Handy, Jeremy Wheeler, Tim Blake Nelson, Daniel Blumberg, Jamie Bogyo, Viola Prettejohn, Natalie Shinnick, Shannon Woodward, Millie-Rose Crossley, Willem van der Vegt, Esmee Hewett, Harry Conway, Benjamin Bagota, Maria Sand, Scott Alexander Young, Matti Boustedt, George Taylor, Alexis Latham, Lark White, Viktória Dányi, and Roy McCrerey.

SYNOPSIS:

Ann Lee, the founding leader of the Shaker Movement, proclaimed as the female Christ by her followers. Depicts her establishment of a utopian society and the Shakers’ worship through song and dance, based on real events.

The second coming of Christ was a woman. Narrated as a story of legend and constructed as a cinematic epic, co-writer/director Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee tells the story of the eponymous 18th-century preacher who occasionally experienced divine visions guiding her on how to teach her and her followers to free themselves and be absolved of sin.

This group, an offshoot of Quakers known as Shakers, did so by stimulating and intoxicating full-body rhythmic dancing movements set to many hymns beautifully sung by Amanda Seyfried and others. The key distinction between the group, and arguably the toughest selling point of the film aside from the religious nature of it all, is that Ann Lee asserted that the only way to achieve such pure holiness is by giving up all sexual relations, living a life of celibacy (as evident by some laughter during the CIFF festival screening when she made this decree, which quickly subsided as it is relatively easy to buy into her mission and convictions).

It shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise that Mona Fastvold had trouble getting this one off the ground. Perhaps what finally secured the project’s financial backing was all those awards The Brutalist (directed by her husband Brady Corbet and co-written by her, flipping those duties and credits this time around) either won or was nominated for, which was notably another film that almost no one had interest in making. The point is that this should serve as a reminder that there is an audience for anything and everything.

Whether one doesn’t care about religious movements or is a nonbeliever, The Testament of Ann Lee is remarkably hypnotic in its craftsmanship. It features a flat-out career-best performance from Amanda Seyfried, who blends all of her strengths as an actor and unleashes them at the peak of her talent. Yes, there are moments of tragedy and trauma, but the film refuses to wallow in misery, chartering her Shakers movement with hope, miracles, and perseverance as the journey takes them from Manchester to Niskayuna, New York, in search of expanding their follower base while dealing with other setbacks within the movement and personally.

Chronicling Ann Lee’s life with precise editing that rarely drags (and mostly fixates on the early stages of the Shakers movement and decade-plus long attempt to battle sexism as a female preacher and find a foothold amidst escalating tensions between British and Americans), the film also offers insight into the events that gave her a repulsion for sexual intimacy, her marriage with blacksmith Abraham (Christopher Abbott), and dynamics with her most loyal supporters which includes brother William (Lewis Pullman) and Mary (Thomasin Mckenzie, also serving as the narrator). Given the unfortunate nature of how most women, especially wives, were expected to have zero agency compared to their male counterparts and deliver babies, it is also organically inspiring watching her find a group with similar beliefs willing to trust her visions and take up celibacy. Whether or not all of them succeed is part of the journey and, interestingly enough, shows who is genuinely loyal and in her corner.

This is no dry biopic, though. Instead, it is brimming with life and energy, mainly through those “shaking” sequences depicting those outstandingly choreographed seizure-like dance numbers (typically shot by William Rexer from an elevated overhead angle, looking down at an entire room, capturing a ridiculous amount of motions all weaving together and creating something uniformly spellbinding). The songs throughout are divinely performed, adding another layer to this film’s transfixing pull. Nearly every image is sublime, right up until the perfect final shot. Admittedly, the film loses a bit of steam in the third act as one awaits a grim confrontation with naysayers who feel threatened by her position, movement, and pacifism regarding the burgeoning American Revolution.

Still, whatever reservations one has about watching a religious movement preaching peace and celibacy while laboring away building a utopia (an aspect that puts it in great juxtaposition with The Brutalist) will wash away like sin. That’s the power of the movies; even someone who isn’t religious will find it hard not to be swept up in Ann Lee’s life. Fact, fiction, bluff… it doesn’t matter; the material is treated with conviction and non-judgmental respect. In The Testament of Ann Lee, Amanda Seyfried channels that for something holy, empowering, infectious, and all around breathtaking.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

Entertainment

The 5 best science books of 2025

Published

9 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

It’s been an uneasy year for science. While there were significant milestones, like breakthroughs in gene editing for rare diseases and novel insights into early human evolution (including fire-making), the U.S. science community at large was rocked by institutional challenges. Drastic federal cuts froze thousands of research grants, and the Trump administration began actively working to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Meanwhile, fraudulent scientific research papers are on the rise — casting a shadow over academic integrity.

Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.

Thankfully, we can still turn to our bookshelves — and podcasts — to ground us. We tapped science doyenne Alie Ward, the host of the funny cult favorite “Ologies” podcast, to share her picks for the best science books of 2025.

Spanning fascinating subjects from bees to human anatomy, Ward’s insightful list reminds us that books remain a timeless vessel for truth and knowledge.

“Ferns: Lessons in Survival From Earth’s Most Adaptable Plants”
By Fay-Wei Li and Jacob S. Suissa
Hardie Grant Books: 192 pages, $45

“Dr. Li is the botanist of our dreams… the way he talks about ferns and why he loves them, and about growing up in Taiwan (in essentially a fern forest), and how the sexual reproduction of ferns has been a great way to draw attention to the LGBTQ and nonbinary community is so charming and funny. They even named a whole genus after Lady Gaga because they were listening to ‘Born This Way’ a lot in the lab and also because there are sequences in their DNA that are ‘GAGA.’

“Laura Silburn’s illustrations are gorgeous — they really put a lot of texture into some of these plants that are really tiny. Every page is like looking at a botany poster. As we’ve seen so much science research being underfunded, especially in the last year, there’s this big question by the culture at large of why does it matter? Why does studying the fern genome matter? It has real-world impacts — that’s fewer pesticides on your crops because we figured out something from a foreign genome. I always love when something is overlooked or taken for granted and because of someone’s passion and their dedication to studying it, we learn that it can change our lives.”

“The ABCs of California’s Native Bees”
By Krystle Hickman
Heyday: 240 pages, $38

“Krystle is an astounding photographer and an incredible visual artist. Her passion for native bees is infectious. A lot of people, when they think of bees, they think of honeybees. And honeybees are not even native to North America. They’re not native to L.A. They’re not native to this country. They’re feral livestock. What I love about her book is it opens your eyes to all of these species that are literally right under our noses that we wouldn’t even consider — and that a lot of people wouldn’t even identify as bees.

“The other reason why I love this book is that she puts these essays into it that are about her experiences going to find the bees. So you’re getting to see these gorgeous landscape pictures. You’re getting to see what it took to find the bee, how to look for it, and more about this particular species. It’s organized in these ABCs that you can pick up at any chapter and check out a bee you’ve never heard of before.”

“Humanish: What Talking to Your Cat or Naming Your Car Reveals About the Uniquely Human Need to Humanize”

By Justin Gregg

Little, Brown: 304 pages, $30

“Justin is hilarious. He is such a good writer, and his voice is really, really approachable. The way that he writes about science is through such a wonderful pop culture and pop science lens. You feel like you’re reading a friend’s email who just has something really interesting to tell you.

“This book is all about anthropomorphizing everything from our toasters to why we like some spiders but hate other spiders. This is a discussion that is so important in this time when we literally have bots on our phones that are like, ‘I’ll be your best friend.’

“Justin speaks to human psychology and our need to want to be friends or villainize objects —or technology or animals — and project our own humanity onto them in ways that are sometimes helpful and sometimes dangerous.

“As a science communicator, you can tell people the most fascinating facts and can give them the best stories. But unless you can give people a takeaway, then a lot of times it doesn’t stick or the interest isn’t there. He really addresses the question of ‘Well, what does this mean for my life?’”

“Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy”
By Mary Roach
W.W. Norton & Co: 288 pages, $28.99

“I’m a long term simp for Mary Roach.

“The humanity that she brings is such a wonderful base for how our bodies fail us sometimes and what we are trying to do to bring them back. From her being present during orthopedic surgeries and the way that she describes the sound of hammer on bone (and just the kind of jovial atmosphere in an operating room that, as a patient, you would never be clued in about because you are passed out half dead on a slab). She really soaks up a vibe that you would never have access to. She goes to Mongolia to learn about eye surgery there in yurts. She takes you to places you would never be able to go. She’s rooting around in archives and old papers — she just makes anything interesting.

“Mary really is both an ally and an outsider, and I think that that’s a really beautiful thing in her book.”

“The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid”
By Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman
Portfolio: 256 pages, $29

“Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is an absolute force. I’ve followed her work in economics and in equity for years, and I was really excited for this book to come out. We did an episode on kalology, which is the study of beauty standards, years ago and I have always loved the conversation of how different members of society have a certain tax on them — these extra resources that they are expected to provide.

“I was really excited to read about specifically women of color, because that is something that I don’t feel is discussed at large. Anna combines the sociology of it with the reality of her experience and other women of color. Because she is so deft when it comes to policy and economics, she also considers, ‘What can we do about this?’ It’s not just enough to discuss this, but what can be done?

“She has totals of what the gender gap is and what the double tax is, and it’s written up like a receipt. This book really addresses the double tax in a way that, even if you have no insight or it’s something that you haven’t thought about — or you are someone who hasn’t experienced this — it’s laying it out economically in a way that is really accessible and has a lot of impact.”

Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and creative nonfiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her first essay collection, “Underneath the Palm Trees,” is forthcoming in early 2027.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: An electric Timothée Chalamet is the consummate striver in propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

Published

19 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Movie Review: An electric Timothée Chalamet is the consummate striver in propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” goes the Tears for Fears song we hear at a key point in “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s nerve-busting adrenaline jolt of a movie starring a never-better Timothée Chalamet.

But here’s the thing: everybody may want to rule the world, but not everybody truly believes they CAN. This, one could argue, is what separates the true strivers from the rest of us.

And Marty — played by Chalamet in a delicious synergy of actor, role and whatever fairy dust makes a performance feel both preordained and magically fresh — is a striver. With every fiber of his restless, wiry body. They should add him to the dictionary definition.

Needless to say, Marty is a New Yorker.

Also needless to say, Chalamet is a New Yorker.

And so is Safdie, a writer-director Chalamet has called “the street poet of New York.” So, where else could this story be set?

It’s 1952, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Marty Mauser is a salesman in his uncle’s shoe store, escaping to the storeroom for a hot tryst with his (married) girlfriend. Suddenly we’re seeing footage of sperm traveling — talk about strivers! — up to an egg. Which morphs, of course, into a pingpong ball.

This witty opening sequence won’t be the only thing recalling “Uncut Gems,” co-directed by Safdie with his brother Benny before the two split for solo projects. That film, which feels much like the precursor to “Marty Supreme,” began as a trip through the shiny innards of a rare opal, only to wind up inside Adam Sandler’s colon, mid-colonoscopy.

Sandler’s Howard Ratner was a New York striver, too, but sadder, and more troubled. Marty is young, determined, brash — with an eye always to the future. He’s a great salesman: “I could sell shoes to an amputee,” he boasts, crassly. But what he’s plotting to unveil to the world has nothing to do with shoes. It’s about table tennis.

This image released by A24 shows Timothée Chalamet in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

How likely is it that this Jewish kid from the Lower East Side can become the very face of a sport in America, soon to be “staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box?”

To Marty, perfectly likely. Still, he knows nobody in the U.S. cares about table tennis. He’s so determined to prove everyone wrong, starting at the British Open in London, that when there’s a snag obtaining cash for his trip, he brandishes a gun at a colleague to get it.

Shaking off that sorta-armed robbery thing, Marty arrives in London, where he fast-talks his way into a suite at the Ritz. Here, he spies fellow guest Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a wise, stylish return to the screen), a former movie star married to an insufferable tycoon (“Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary, one of many nonactors here.)

Kay’s skeptical, but Marty finds a way to woo her. Really, all he has to say is: “Come watch me.” Once she sees him play, she’s sneaking into his room in a lace corselet.

This image released by A24 shows Gwyneth Paltrow in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

This would be a good time to stop and consider Chalamet’s subtly transformed appearance. He is stick-thin — duh, he never stops moving. His mustache is skimpy. His skin is acne-scarred — just enough to erase any movie-star sheen. Most strikingly, his eyes, behind the round spectacles, are beady — and smaller. Definitely not those movie-star eyes.

But then, nearly all the faces in “Marty Supreme” are extraordinary. In a movie with more than 100 characters, we have known actors (Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara); nonacting personalities (O’Leary, and an excellent Tyler Okonma (Tyler, The Creator) as Marty’s friend Wally); and exciting newcomers like Odessa A’Zion as Marty’s feisty girlfriend Rachel.

There are also a slew of nonactors in small parts, plus cameos from the likes of David Mamet and even high wire artist Philippe Petit. The dizzying array makes one curious how it all came together — is casting director Jennifer Venditti taking interns? Production notes tell us that for one hustling scene at a bowling alley, young men were recruited from a sports trading-card convention.

Elsewhere on the creative team, composer Daniel Lopatin succeeds in channelling both Marty’s beating heart and the ricochet of pingpong balls in his propulsive score. The script by Safdie and cowriter Ronald Bronstein, loosely based on real-life table tennis hustler Marty Reisman, beats with its own, never-stopping pulse. The same breakneck aesthetic applies to camera work by Darius Khondji.

Back now to London, where Marty makes the finals against Japanese player Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, like his character a deaf table tennis champion). “I’ll be dropping a third atom bomb on them,” he brags — not his only questionable World War II quip. But Endo, with his unorthodox paddle and grip, prevails.

After a stint as a side act with the Harlem Globetrotters, including pingpong games with a seal — you’ll have to take our word for this, folks, we’re running low on space — Marty returns home, determined to make the imminent world championships in Tokyo.

But he’s in trouble — remember he took cash at gunpoint? Worse, he has no money.

So Marty’s on the run. And he’ll do anything, however messy or dangerous, to get to Japan. Even if he has to totally debase himself (mark our words), or endanger friends — or abandon loyal and brave Rachel.

This image released by A24 shows Odessa A'zion in a scene from — This image released by A24 shows Odessa A’zion in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

Is there something else for Marty, besides his obsessive goal? If so, he doesn’t know it yet. But the lyrics of another song used in the film are instructive here: “Everybody’s got to learn sometime.”

So can a single-minded striver ultimately learn something new about his own life?

We’ll have to see. As Marty might say: “Come watch me.”

“Marty Supreme,” an A24 release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for language throughout, sexual content, some violent content/bloody images and nudity.” Running time: 149 minutes. Four stars out of four.