Zendaya's new movie serves up spicy tennis

Spicy tennis melodrama “Challengers” is all about the emotional games we play with each other, though there’s certainly enough volleys, balls and sweaty close-ups if you’re more into pockets than metaphors.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name”) sets the art house heights of the sports movie, with fierce competition, even fiercer personalities and athletic bravado set to the pulsing beats of a Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross techno-riff. “Challengers” (★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) centers on a love triangle between double partners-turned-rivals (Mike Feist and Josh O’Connor) and a teenage prodigy (Zendaya) and how lust, ambition and power dynamics develop their relationship over 13 years.

The film opens with Art (Feist) and Tashi (Zendaya) as the pair of professional tennis players: He is eyeing a US Open title, the only tournament he has never won, while she is his intense coach, manager and wife, a former sensation along the lines of Venus or Serena, whose career was cut short by a severe knee injury. To build up his low self-esteem after recent losses, Tashi enters Art in a lower-level event where he can dominate – until he faces former best Patrick (O’Connor) in the final match.

Justin Kuritzks’ soapy script jumps between that present and the three’s complicated pasts through flashbacks, starting when Art and Patrick — the ride-or-die duo known as Fire and Ice — both have eyes for Tashi. All three are 18 and hormones are buzzing: The boys have been tight since they were in boarding school, but a late-night, three-way makeout session and the fact that she’ll only give her number to whoever wins a boys’ singles match creates a seismic rift , which plays out over the coming years.

All three main actors hone their arcs and change their looks over time – the key to a non-linear film like this that’s all over the place. As Tashi, Zendaya plays a woman who exudes unwavering confidence, even though her passion for these two men seems to be her only weakness. Feist (“West Side Story”) crafts Art as a talented precision player whose love for the game may not be what it once was, while O’Connor (“The Crown”) gives Patrick a charming swing with and without a racket, even though his life has turned into a bit of a disaster.

From the start, the men’s closeness hints at more than friendship, a quasi-sexual tension that Tashi likes to play with: She jokes that she doesn’t want to be a “home wrecker,” but wears a devilish grin when Art and Patrick they kiss, knowing the mess he’s making.

Tennis is “relationship,” Tashi informs them, and Guadagnino uses the sport to create moments of contentious conversation as well as cathartic release. Driven by pulsating electronics, his tennis scenes mix brutality and grace, with stylish super-duper close-ups and even showing the point of view of the ball in one dizzying sequence. Would you do the same with, say, curling or golf? It would be great to see because more often than not you want to go back to the sweaty spectacle.

Guadagnino probably could have made a whole movie about male vulnerability in athletics instead of just teasing it with “Challengers,” with revealing moments in locker rooms and saunas. But the film already struggles with narrative momentum, given the many tangents in Tashi, Art and Patrick’s thorny relationships: while not exactly slack, the film clocks in at 131 minutes and the script could use the same toning as its tough performers.

Zendaya’s new movie serves up spicy tennis

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