'Challengers' review: Game, set, match, tennis drama is a sizzler

Sexy, energized and alive in a way that feels fully fresh and new, "Challengers" is an injection of pure adrenaline plunged straight into your moviegoing heart, a reminder of how vibrant movies can be when they're firing on all cylinders.

"Call Me By Your Name's" Luca Guadagnino directs this love triangle tennis drama like his eyes are popping out of his head, and the film is laced with a head nodding, dance-all-night techno score, courtesy of Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The effect leaves you buzzing, drunk and in love with the power of movies and excited about the future of the art form.

That's how electrifying it feels to spend time in this world.

An utterly radiant Zendaya stars as Tashi Duncan, a budding tennis superstar, and Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor star as a pair of close friends and tennis prodigies who compete for her affections. These three are inseparable from each other, through rivalries on the court and in the bedroom, and the script by first-time screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes hops back and forth through time, giving us bits and pieces of their individual and shared relationship dynamics over a period of 13 years.

"Challengers" opens in 2019 at a small tournament in New Rochelle, New York, where a down-and-out Patrick Zweig (O'Connor) is barely getting by, sleeping in his car the night before his first match. Meanwhile Art Donaldson (Faist) — joined by his wife Tashi, whose own career has been ended by a knee injury — is a big international star but has hit a losing streak, and is looking to get his groove back by slicing through the lesser tournament competition on his way to the U.S. Open.

We don't know it yet, but Patrick and Art have history. They came up through the tennis world together, best buds and boarding school bunkmates since they were 12, whose lives were mutually rocked by the arrival of Tashi. The story playfully — almost comically — shifts around between 2019 and 2006 and a few spots in between, with a particular focus on the night the three meet and share a rendezvous inside a hotel room, where Tashi deftly coaxes out the lingering homoerotic tension between the two boys.

Tashi becomes the center of the universe for Patrick and Art, and her to them, each inexorably linked to one another. Time goes by, relationships shift, egos are bruised, lust remains, and a climactic showdown on the tennis court between the pair has much more on the line than the tournament's $7,200 purse.

"Challengers" unspools with dizzying energy, due in large part to its use of sound, both the on-the-court thwacks of the tennis ball and its hyper-charged music. Rather than a traditional instrumental or catalog pop song score, Guadagnino calls on Reznor and Ross (they also scored his 2022 hipster cannibal road trip drama "Bones and All"), whose pulsating dance music soundtracks the movie and gives it the feeling of a club remix of itself. The NIN duo's film work to date has tended to favor moody, low-end piano notes and hissy scratches — think of their Oscar-winning work on "The Social Network" — but here they've created an upbeat, sweaty rave set to film, which infuses the film with a jolt of electricity that kicks it into another gear altogether.

Guadagnino reteams with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who also shot "Call Me By Your Name" and "Suspiria," and the tennis scenes jump from the screen, with tennis balls flying straight into the camera, like gag effects from an early 3-D movie. It heightens the tension of the on-court action, which is never just about the ball going over the net, but the way it relates back to the characters and what brought them to the court in the first place. This is tennis as a metaphor for life.

Zendaya, Faist and O'Connor are a sizzling trio, conveying their obsession, determination and competition between their characters as athletes, friends and lovers in equal measure. (This would be a starmaking performance from Zendaya, if she weren't already a gigantic star.) The script doesn't play favorites or tell us who to root for, it's more sophisticated than that, and allows viewers to see the characters as people, flaws and all. It's a magnificently fun and fully involving work and does that thing that great movies do: it pulls you in, holds you in its grasp and doesn't let go. "Challengers" is an ace.

agraham@detroitnews.com

'Challengers'

GRADE: A

Rated R: for language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity

Running time: 131 minutes

In theaters