‘Molly’s Game’ makes for an enjoyable tumble

Aaron Sorkin has a knack for timing, and not just in the obvious way.

The Oscar-winning writer of “The Social Network,” “Moneyball” and other fast-talking, crackling scripts has been celebrated for his mile-a-minute wordplay. But he’s also been criticized for not exactly featuring complex, strong female characters in the malecentric worlds of his stories.

In “Molly’s Game,” his first film with a female protagonist and his directorial debut, Sorkin turns that around, presenting one of the more interesting female characters this season. There’s obviously no better time for this change in focus. And he could have chosen no better partner in crime — white-collar crime, that is — than Jessica Chastain, one of the most intelligent and watchable actresses in movies today.

So far, so good. Chastain plays Molly Bloom, who went from being an Olympic skiing hopeful to spending years running high-stakes, celebrity-studded poker games in Los Angeles and New York, hosting names like Tobey Maguire, Ben Affleck and Leonardo DiCaprio, until it all came crashing down when the Russian mob got involved and the FBI showed up, arresting her as part of an illegal gambling operation. She faced prison time but was ultimately cleared of many charges and got off with probation, a fine and community service.

We begin with a terrific sequence on the ski slopes. A young Bloom is on her way to a spot at the Olympics but slips on an unfortunately placed pine cone and crashes spectacularly. Her ski career is over.

If you know Sorkin’s work, it won’t surprise you to hear he doesn’t stick to a chronological timeline in the film — rather, he dips in and out of periods in Bloom’s life.

It also won’t surprise you to know that Sorkin departs liberally from Bloom’s own memoir to tell her story, relying on what he says were hundreds of hours of talking to his subject about things she never wrote about.

What we take from that early ski accident is that Molly is a survivor.

We jump to 12 years later, with Molly lying in bed and the FBI bursting in, guns blazing. How did she get from the slopes to the handcuffs? Now, back to several years earlier: She’s postponed law school and is soaking in the LA sun, working as a cocktail waitress, when a pompous patron (Jeremy Strong) hires her. He’s a jerk, but through him, she is introduced to the high-stakes world of celebrity poker.

It’s a dizzying ride, and a wordy one; if Sorkin were being paid by the word, he’d have the best deal in Hollywood. A constant voiceover propels the action forward, with zingers like Molly saying she was in a hole so deep, “I could have gone fracking.”