Watch a clip from ‘Battle of the Sexes,’ starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell. Photo: Searchlight Pictures 
 
 It’s the highly improbable Howard Cosell, nasal twang resurrected on Nixon-era videotape, who finally pulls together the very entertaining but disparate parts of “Battle of the Sexes.” Directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (“Little Miss Sunshine”), the film is an extremely good-natured, upbeat recounting of the infamous Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King “man vs. woman” match of 1973. But it doesn’t generate much urgency, not till the sportscaster is heard on air, introducing Ms. King at the Houston Astrodome: 
 
 “A very attractive young lady,” Cosell begins; the viewer braces him/herself. “If she ever let her hair grow down to her shoulders and took her glasses off, you’d have someone vying for a Hollywood screen test.” 
 
 Oh, OK: The importance of this rather vintage story wasn’t about equal rights, equal pay or men and women being equals on the tennis court. It wasn’t even about Ms. King’s coming to terms with her sexuality, though that’s a major part of the movie’s narrative. No, it was about the need to confront a world in which someone with the global exposure of a Cosell could, and would, so casually objectify the top woman tennis player in the world, and do it for a TV audience of 90 million people. 
 
 Emma Stone Photo: Fox Searchlight 
 
 Ms. King is played with what might be called pluck by the ordinarily effervescent Emma Stone. She, like everyone involved with this film, has a specific challenge on her hands: Transform a woman who is essentially living her life undercover into an inspiring champion of women’s rights, transparency and fair play. The story, naturally, leans the other way, and the pacing doesn’t help: The build-up to Ms. King’s seduction by her hairdresser, Marilyn Barnett ( Andrea Riseborough ), takes so long you want to yell, “Just do it already!” Eventually, they do. 
 
 A different problem is presented by Riggs, the ex-champ and tennis hustler for whom obnoxiousness was a marketing tool and who was in thrall to a gambling jones that threatened his marriage and, maybe, his person. (Rumors that he threw the match to Ms. King because of mob debts have long persisted, despite making very little sense, except as a lame excuse for his three-set trouncing.) Not surprisingly, directors Faris and Dayton and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”) skew matters toward a more likable Riggs, even a quasi-tragic one, and they have the priceless asset of Steve Carell playing the role. It deserves to be said that Mr. Carell is both a bona-fide movie star and a marvelous actor, two things that don’t always go together. Rarer still is his willingness to embrace unsympathetic roles into which he simply disappears—the homicidal John du Pont in “Foxcatcher” comes immediately to mind. Watching him play the bratty Riggs evokes something very close to love. 
 
 Steve Carell and Emma Stone Photo: Fox Searchlight 
 
 The principals get more or less equal time en route to Houston, but Riggs is, marginally, the more poignant character. A late scene with his son Larry (an affecting Lewis Pullman ) is a heartbreaking moment of sudden self-awareness: The boy, moments before the King match, declines to attend, and the look on Riggs’s face is one of stunned recognition—the son is embarrassed by the father. 
 
 But Mr. Carell isn’t the only one bringing his A game to “Battle of the Sexes.” Bill Pullman is charmingly oleaginous as Jack Kramer, the head of what was then the U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association, who kicks Ms. King and her players out after they form the Women’s Tennis Association; it’s fascinating to watch Mr. Pullman’s Kramer lean ever so slightly off-center when Ms. King gets him on the rhetorical ropes. Elisabeth Shue is nothing short of regal as Riggs’s wife, Priscilla, whose family money kept Riggs both well-maintained and bored, and whose attempts to get her boy-man husband to attend Gamblers Anonymous meetings are purely quixotic. (“You’re not here because you’re gamblers,” Riggs bellows at his fellow addicts. “You’re here because you’re terrible gamblers!!” So much for 12-step programs.) 
 
 Emma Stone Photo: Fox Searchlight 
 
 Sarah Silverman, as the Eve Arden-esque Gladys Heldman, and Alan Cumming, as tennis-dress designer Teddy Tinling, steal every scene they’re in. And Ms. Riseborough, whose Marilyn rouses Ms. King’s inner lesbian, makes Ms. Barnett a seductively winsome muse. The pair’s future palimony suit goes unmentioned for obvious dramatic reasons, including the fact that Ms. King would end up losing all her endorsements and incurring huge legal costs at the time her sexuality actually went public. The movie would much prefer us to believe the world was changed by a tennis match. 
 
 —Mr. Anderson writes on TV for the Journal. Joe Morgenstern is away. 
 
 Appeared in the September 22, 2017, print edition as 'With Ace Actors, but Not Without Its Faults.' ||||| Battle of the Sexes 
 
 type Movie genre Sports, Drama release date 09/22/17 performer Steve Carell, Emma Stone director Valerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton Current Status In Season mpaa PG-13 
 
 We gave it a B+ 
 
 She’s 29, a world-class athlete at the top of her game. He’s a hard-living 55 whose Wimbledon days are decades behind him and whose favorite form of cardio is running his mouth. But the now-iconic 1973 face-off between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs was never really about the tennis; it was a litmus test for the era, a flashpoint where social politics, sport, and celebrity met on the court before an estimated 90 million television viewers. 
 
 Emma Stone, in librarian wire-rims and a chocolate brown shag, plays the public King as an undauntable renegade — she fights fiercely to hold on to her No. 1 ranking, and effectively invents the Women’s Tennis Association when the regular league refuses to raise the ladies’ $1,500 championship prize to match the men’s $12,000. But in private she’s racked with self-doubt. And when a swinging L.A. hairdresser named Marilyn (Bloodline’s Andrea Riseborough) comes into her life, the spark between them threatens to upend not just King’s marriage but everything she’s worked for professionally. 
 
 Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (Little Miss Sunshine) paint Sexes’ battles in the bright primary colors of the film’s ’70s setting, soundtracking it all to groovy AM-radio gold and sanding down the ragged edges of Riggs’ noxious misogyny. In Steve Carell’s amiable hands, Bobby’s antics — he’s an incurable gambler and huckster, proud to be “putting the show back in chauvinism” — are more clownish than offensive, a goofy cultural dinosaur with the vintage yellowed veneers to match. Though this is Stone and Carell’s second time on screen together, after 2011’s Crazy Stupid Love, they actually share only a scant handful of scenes. But their separation opens up the story to a raft of splashy supporting turns, including Alan Cumming as the WTA’s droll wardrobe designer, Elisabeth Shue as Riggs’ long-suffering wife, Sarah Silverman as King’s chain-smoking go-go agent, and Fred Armisen as a shark-eyed Dr. Feelgood in a white leisure suit, handing out horse pills like Skittles. And though it’s obvious that Billie Jean’s real romance is with the dreamy, golden-haired Marilyn, Austin Stowell brings quiet pathos to Larry — the man cast more as caretaker, cheerleader, and perpetual plus-one than husband. (When he tells Marilyn that they’ll both place distant seconds in the end to his wife’s first love, tennis, it’s with resignation, not bitterness.) 
 
 As Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire screenwriter Simon Beaufoy builds to the titular showdown, it hardly matters that the match itself doesn’t look like much. The symbolic power of what happened there — one small step, one giant leap for womankind — is still the movie’s truest ace. B+ ||||| Look anywhere around you, and it’s obvious: Sexism sells. In 1973, tennis hall of famer Bobby Riggs exploited that fact to goad Billie Jean King into competing in a match he billed “The Battle of the Sexes.” 
 
 Riggs knew which buttons to push to get a whopping 90 million viewers to tune into the game. “She doesn’t stand a chance against me,” Riggs told one journalist. “Women’s tennis is so far beneath men’s tennis.” For the cheap seats, he bragged, “I want to prove that women are lousy, they stink, and they don’t belong on the same court as a man.” 
 
 Played by a sideburned and snaggle-toothed Steve Carrell in “Battle of the Sexes,” Bobby comes off as an ass and a clown but, importantly, never a buffoon. Most of us will go into Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ biopic of King with the knowledge that the female sports pioneer will trounce her showboating opponent. But it matters that Billie Jean (Emma Stone) squares off against a worthy adversary; there’s nothing impressive about being smarter than a caveman. Handsome and moving if a bit cautious, “Battle” is full of smart complexities and sensational acting, and it deserves to be considered a serious awards contender. 
 
 Watch Video: 'Battle of the Sexes' First Trailer: Emma Stone, Steve Carell 'Put the Show Back in Chauvinism' 
 
 There was nothing fair, whatever that means in this case, about the Battle of the Sexes: Riggs was 55 and had retired from the main circuit years ago; the 29-year-old King was the reigning champion of women’s tennis but also saddled with the burden of “justifying” female professional athletics, if not the entire Second Wave of feminism, to the world. 
 
 At the drama’s outset, Billie Jean and her sardonic, skunk-streaked business partner Gladys (a career-best Sarah Silverman) form their own championship tour when the female players are offered an eighth of the prize money that male athletes get. Writer Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”) weaves the story of Billie Jean’s fight for gender equality with that of her sexual coming of age. 
 
 Billie Jean’s eyes fall just before joining her husband Larry (a terrific Austin Stowell, “Bridge of Spies”) in a dance. But when the athlete meets liberated hairdresser Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough), she can’t stop looking. The scenes of blossoming eroticism, as Marilyn cuts Billie Jean’s tresses and gives the tennis star a new way of seeing herself, forge a new dialect of sensuality. 
 
 Watch Video: 'Battle of the Sexes' Filmmakers on Why Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs Showdown Is Still Relevant 
 
 Stone gives a much more compelling and subtle performance here than she did in “La La Land,” for which she won the Best Actress Oscar earlier this year. Dayton and Faris, whose previous films include “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Ruby Sparks,” accomplish via their close-ups of Stone what Todd Haynes’ “Carol” could not: a thrumming, throbbing period romance conveyed through a series of gazes. It helps that, other than on the court, the only place where we see Billie Jean exploit her physical grace is in the lonely hotel rooms where the athlete and hair stylist discover one another. 
 
 If “Battle” betrays its subject anywhere, it’s in the meekness of the characterization of King. Hardly anywhere in sight is the ambition and hyper-competitiveness that it takes to become a record-breaking champion. (Serena Williams is still routinely pilloried for exhibiting such “unfeminine” traits today.) In a climactic scene, when Billie Jean sets the record straight about what message she wants to send with the Battle of the Sexes, she merely states, “We deserve some respect.” (Just some?) 
 
 And when Bobby suggests that their match pit “Male Chauvinist Pig [against] Hairy-Legged Feminist,” Billie Jean shoots back that she does shave her legs before hanging up on him. Women can do anything, the film implies, as long as they stay within the box of Hollywood’s standards for female likability. 
 
 Also Read: Fall Festivals Say It Loud: Here Comes Awards Season 
 
 Unsurprisingly, then, Carrell nearly steals the picture as a man who’s so busy hustling for a second chance that he doesn’t realize his life is actually a tragedy. The domestic scenes in which the aging gambler chafes against his wealthy wife’s (a superb Elisabeth Shue) aloof disapproval make up some of the film’s most heartfelt moments. When the huckster starts believing his own hype, everything goes downhill. (“Battle” discards the latter-day theory that an indebted Riggs threw the game after betting large on King.) 
 
 Gleaming among the large supporting cast are Bill Pullman as a vindictive announcer, Alan Cumming as Billie Jean’s mentor to LGBTQ reality in the early ’70s, and Jessica McNamee (“CHIPS”) as rival tennis star Margaret Court. 
 
 “Battle” builds gradually to the big event, which, thanks in part to Riggs’ showmanship, becomes something of a circus, replete with farm animals, palanquins manned by gladiators, and a wedding ceremony. (If Riggs wins, the bride will take the groom’s name, and vice versa.) The actual match is surprisingly tense, if disappointingly shot mostly aerially. 
 
 What’s at stake — in a clash that feels particularly resonant in 2017 — is the one between the past and the future. In these divisive times, “Battle of the Sexes” allows us all to cheer for the right side of history.
– Battle of the Sexes takes viewers back to 1973 and the Houston Astrodome, the setting of the famous exhibition tennis match between feminist icon Billie Jean King (Emma Stone), then 29, and chauvinist Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), then 55. As viewers learn, the game wasn't the only thing at stake for King. Here's what critics are saying: Battle of the Sexes is not only "almost remedial in its timeliness, given last year's political grudge match," but it's "warm, earnestly entertaining" and "a pleasure to watch," writes Ann Hornaday at Washington Post. Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton bring the 1970s to life "with verve and humor," helped by "gifted comic actors in supporting turns that crackle with winking good fun," she adds. Sarah Silverman, in particular, stands out. Stone plays King as "an undauntable renegade" in public but "racked with self-doubt" in private, while Carell's chauvinistic Riggs is "more clownish than offensive," writes Leah Greenblatt at Entertainment Weekly. The pair hardly ever meet except for their famous match, which doesn't really wow. But that "hardly matters," writes Greenblatt. "The symbolic power of what happened there—one small step, one giant leap for womankind—is still the movie's truest ace." Supporting actors Silverman and Alan Cumming "steal every scene they're in." But it's Carell who brings his "A game" so that Riggs emerges as "marginally, the more poignant character," according to John Anderson at the Wall Street Journal. "Carell is both a bona-fide movie star and a marvelous actor, two things that don't always go together" and "watching him play the bratty Riggs evokes something very close to love," he writes. Inkoo Kang at the Wrap agrees Carell shines, but she attributes this to "the meekness of the characterization of King. Hardly anywhere in sight is the ambition and hyper-competitiveness that it takes to become a record-breaking champion." But though "subtle," Stone's performance is still "compelling," and the film is "handsome and moving" and "full of smart complexities" that should make it "a serious awards contender," Kang writes.