now more than ever, it's Timmy Time

america's sweetheart: he's just a dude!

Where were you when you first found out about Timothée Chalamet? Personally, I was curled up in a velvet seat at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor during Accepted Students’ Weekend in 2017, into which my mom and I cluelessly stumbled for a spontaneous afternoon viewing of an indie movie we’d heard was good called Lady Bird. It was a glorious introduction—who was this lanky, angular boy who read A People’s History and wanted to exist on bartering alone? I’ve been a dedicated follower of his career since, but it’s hard not to be: he pioneered the modern movement for being a heartthrob while looking like a malnourished Victorian person, and he’s a fantastic, surprisingly versatile actor. He can be swoony (Little Women), heartbreaking (Beautiful Boy), and he can convincingly play Bob Dylan (A Complete Unknown). He’s an incredible SNL host, a notoriously difficult accomplishment (too many to link, but my favorite is this underdiscussed gem). He’s played all sorts of roles, even really embarrassing ones like Willy Wonka, and people still love him. That’s really hard! It doesn’t take a lot for the people of the internet to decide you’re ugly!

Timmy occupying a crucial fraction of the cultural conversation is not new, but it’s certainly reached a fever pitch—he’s carrying a successful movie by a director beloved by the Letterboxd masses, he’s dating the hottest Kardashian/Jenner, and Polymarket has loudly let us know that he’s heavily favored to take Best Actor in a Leading Role at this year’s Oscars, an award that hasn’t been won by a young guy since Adrien Brody (then 29) in 2003 for The Pianist (more on him later). It is, objectively, Timmy Time, and I’m happy to be here.

As you can imagine, we’re talking about Marty Supreme today, among some other things. Onto the rundown!

Marty Supreme / dir. Josh Safdie

After being unsuccessful in my efforts to convince my family to see Marty Supreme with me when I was home for break, I finally watched it back in the city. In the front row of the AMC Village 7, no less, an immersive viewing experience I found thrilling and my best friend sitting next to me found extremely unpleasant.

It goes almost without saying that Timothée Chalamet’s performance is wonderful—he brings a buoyant energy and a clear-eyed earnestness to Marty, a myopic and morally compromised antihero who might, under different circumstances, be difficult to root for. But he can’t help it! He has big dreams and he’s chasing them, god dammit! The supporting performances are also great—Tyler the Creator should be cast in one million more movies, and Odessa A’Zion gets far more to chew on here than she ever did in I Love LA (if you haven’t seen her audition tape that A24 just released, recommend!). I didn’t particularly care about the Gwyneth Paltrow side plot, but she’s doing what she does best, which is play a horny out-of-touch rich woman with a penchant for bad behavior.

Top to bottom, it’s a very good movie, a frenetic thrill ride careening towards an inevitable adrenaline crash. But in the days since I watched it, I’ve realized I care about it less as an actual film and more as a star vehicle for Chalamet, a delicious fulfillment of his blustery proclamations from last year’s awards campaign for A Complete Unknown. It’s obviously been the topic of a great deal of conversation how closely Marty’s drive towards success at whatever cost necessary mirrors Timothée’s well-documented attitude towards “greatness,” as defined by big dogs such as Viola Davis and, inexplicably, Michael Phelps. Is it possible the awards campaign for A Complete Unknown was intended as subliminal early-stage marketing for Marty? Stranger things have happened, and we know the boy’s been practicing his ping-pong skills since the Dune days.

Whatever the scheme, it seems to be working—Timmy’s win at the Globes this past weekend is another step towards his increasingly likely Oscars win in March. But unlike last year, his acceptance speeches and general red carpet vibe in the last few weeks have been elegant and understated. It makes sense to me that in the wake of Marty Supreme’s critical and financial success, Timmy’s finally playing it cool. It’s as if to insist he doesn’t really care if he gets the Oscar after all, though of course, it’s precisely this attitude that will win him one. That, and the fact that everyone regrets giving it to blowhard loser Adrien Brody last year and having to sit through a painful, pretentious self-mythologizing speech that went on about twelve minutes too long.

Still thinking about this outfit

The cherry on top of all of this, naturally, is his newly-extremely-public relationship with Kylie Jenner, who’s been doing a bang-up job of wearing bedazzled gowns and looking luminous on camera while she and Timmy nuzzle each other adorably. I am embarrassingly invested in this couple—I believe they are deeply in love, that shared offspring is imminent, and that anyone asking “What do they even talk about?” has an inflated idea of how intelligent Timothée is. This is not meant as a real slight, just a reminder that, while undoubtedly a gifted actor, Chalamet is a boyish rascal with a fratty laugh who once gave an entire college campus chlamydia.

Regardless of the outcome on Oscars night, I’m buckling up for an all-time awards campaign, hopefully full of more butter-yellow suits, random boy-podcast appearances, and TikToks by “professional lip readers” who try to poorly interpret what he and Kylie are whispering to each other while groping under the table at the SAG Awards. Cheers!

LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching / dir. Owen Reiser

I found out about this free and criminally underseen YouTube documentary from a Substack note by Sentimental Garbage’s Caroline O’Donoghue, and thank god I did. Listers follows two novice birdwatchers/stoner hockey boy brothers from Ohio as they embark upon a cross-country van adventure to see as many birds as possible in one year, interacting along their way with other birdwatchers in pursuit of the same goal. It is a fucking delight. There’s witty editing, there are gossipy, anthropological detours, and there’s a surprising amount of stopmotion animation. Director/editor Owen and his brother Quentin (the film’s main onscreen presence, as Owen is usually behind the camera) are endearing and funny and a great hang. They occasionally poke fun at some of the stranger idiosyncrasies of competitive birdwatching, particularly how the hobby has changed shape in response to new technology (like the app “eBird,” which I learned a lot about), but mostly these guys approach it all with genuine curiosity and passion. While most of the doc is charmingly low-fi, the actual bird content is beautifully shot. I’m not normally a huge documentary girl, but I think this thing should be in festivals. I adored it. Recommend if you have an Outdoor Boys-sized hole in your heart, if you have even a passing appreciation for birds/nature, or for men with mustaches. Pairs well with an edible.

The Testament of Ann Lee / dir. Mona Fastvold

A musical about the origins of the Shaker movement sounds like an odd sell, but I was really taken with this. Amanda Seyfried dazzles in the titular role, and the music and choreography are intricate and mesmerizing. This is also one of the best-looking films I’ve seen in quite a while (no doubt bolstered by the fact that I got to see this in 70mm at the Village East)—it’s not often that I get emotional about set building, but I stayed up late reading interviews with production designer Sam Bader, who did a magical job bringing the physical spaces of this film to life. Feeling like I’d like to purchase some Shaker-style wooden furniture!

The Plague / dir. Charlie Polinger

95 minutes reliving the squirming hell that is being a middle schooler—like Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade for boys, or like if Diary of a Wimpy Kid’s infamous Cheese Touch was spun into a harrowing psychological thriller. My new very favorite actor Everett Blunck carries this movie spectacularly as a kind, insecure boy attending water polo summer camp, where a nasty-looking and highly contagious rash referred to as The Plague by the preternaturally nonchalant cool kids is beginning to run rampant. (Blunck also stole the show as a precocious aspiring playwright with a crush in Griffin in Summer, a movie I watched over Christmas break and adored). The Plague is deliciously uncomfortable, rife with the cruel indignities of puberty and accompanied by a taut, screeching score. Fifteen-year-old Kayo Martin, who plays the main antagonist, also has a bright future ahead of him playing the Joker or some other sociopath.

Anthropology of an American Girl / Hilary Thayer Hamann

A fascinating read that I chugged through this week and am still unsure of whether I loved or hated. Anthropology of an American Girl follows a girl named Eveline through the years after falling in love with a man (an actor slash boxer) (insane) named Rourke her senior year of high school. When they meet, Rourke is 25 to Eveline’s 17, the shadowy, intriguing assistant director for the school play (I know). Eveline is mostly a moody, wet blanket of a protagonist, and this book heavily romanticizes starvation/physical weakness as some sort of poetic power of seduction, a very real cultural phenomenon I find contemptible and annoying. She is constantly fainting and being offered water, and is lusted after and doted on by every man that comes across her path.

According to internet research, Hamann self-published this book in 2003 before it was revised and re-released by an actual imprint, though what exactly was revised is unclear—this reads like an unedited novel to the highest degree, meandering and full of oblique philosophical asides. It has an unearned confidence in its sprawl, trusting you’ll care enough to read 600 pages from the perspective of a self-destructive teenager who stumbles into the throes of a true love more thunderous than, she would imagine, anyone else could possibly experience.

Sounds like I hated it, right? If only I had the willpower. Coming of age stories are crack to me. I will read them all. And against my better judgment, there’s a stretch of this book I found transcendent—after Evie and Rourke first see each other but before they’ve really come together, as they silently, torturedly orbit each other, each waiting for a way in. Their relationship operates within a sort of dream logic, entirely unrepresentative of how anyone acts in real life. Much of the book’s magic comes from the way it evokes the feeling of being understood without having to open your mouth—there’s not all that much dialogue, and characters often seem to read each others’ minds, responding out loud to thoughts never actually spoken. Rourke and Evie are drawn together like magnets, each finding themselves the owner of an implicit, inexplicable knowledge of where the other is located at all times. And yet, as ridiculous as it sounds, we have all felt too aware of someone entering a room, even when you’re facing away from the door.

I was pissed at this book by the end, and yet I devoured it, 600 pages and all—and that means a fair amount coming from me, a known proponent of dropping books like flies. While Hamann’s writing is often overwrought, it can also be glittering and visceral—more than a handful of scenes stopped me in my tracks, and it’s the first book to make me cry in probably six months. I can’t in good conscience recommend it, but if you’re interested in feeling melancholy and vaguely sorry for yourself (as I always do in January), this is a nice book to take a little respite in.

P.S.

• Quick hits. People We Meet On Vacation: Sugary sweet millennial vacation porn that perfectly understands the tone and intentions of an Emily Henry novel. Tom Blyth has got It and I’m hearing that Luca Guadagnino, resident arbiter of hot boys, thinks so as well. Stranger Things: I don’t hate happiness and I didn’t need a high kill count to feel emotionally/narratively satisfied, but I think this was a ridiculous and mostly limp finale, the best part of which was seeing Steve Harrington as a Little League coach. Tell Me Lies: I’m back in on this deranged little show. Grace Van Patten is one of the most beautiful people to walk this earth.

• Big things happening over on HBO—The Pitt and Industry airing at the same time is truly an embarrassment of riches. My feverish love for The Pitt is well-documented, but I think Industry is the biggest unsung hero of modern television—it’s consistently surprising and brilliant and I can’t get any of my friends to watch it for the life of me. I’ll save my real breakdowns until the end of the month, when we’ll be 3-ish episodes into each series, but my excitement cannot be overstated.

• Audrey Hobert’s debut album, Who’s the Clown?, has grown on me like moss. I adore her bouncy, slumber-party musicality and her awko-taco lyricism and the way she really enunciates her vowels. I’m frequently singing “He’s heating up and eating up a pizza pocket/I wanted one, but he forgot it” to myself under my breath.

That’s all—love you! And a YouTube link for the road.