Jonah Naplan December 30, 2025
Marty Mauser seems to be running from just about everyone and everything—responsibility, family, the cops, impending fatherhood, and loads upon loads of thugs whom he’s significantly indebted to. It’s all out to give him a whooping. He sure gets one eventually, quite literally smacked in the ass by the token of his dreams, but his unchanging superiority complex, even in the midst of chaos, miraculously allows him to bypass many of the reckonings that most human beings would typically have to deal with at some point in their lives. The guy’s a wunderkind magician, and this is just one of the several tricks up his sleeve.
Co-written and directed by Josh Safdie, “Marty Supreme” is a movie about a young man whose big dreams should frankly be the least of his concerns. Despite being supposedly the greatest table tennis player in the world, Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) can’t catch a break. It might have something to do with his countervailing tendency to cut ties rather than forge connections with the people who could give him the biggest opportunities, his hustling habits often burning the bridges that might have boosted him to immediate success. He’s arrested by the idea of always being on top, chasing who he thinks he is and deserves to be, a high level of fame and fortune that comes with a price.
The opening scenes of “Marty Supreme” establish everything we might want to know about the protagonist and the world he lives in. It’s 1952, and New York City is hopping. Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein take us into all the sweaty, cramped clubs of the Lower East Side underbelly, as Marty, a lowly shoe salesman, etches a name for himself among the neighborhood regulars. In between table tennis matches, he makes love to Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who’s got a boyfriend of her own named Ira (Emory Cohen), but is clearly more interested in the ambitious and big-headed Marty, who talks of creating a bright future but can’t quite seem to follow through with the beginning steps.
Marty’s first ping pong championship in London makes for the movie’s first impressive setpiece. Wedded to an overwhelming synth score by Daniel Lopatin and editing from Safdie and Bronstein, this early sequence hums with propulsive life. The master camerawork from Darius Khondji highlights the back-and-forth rhythm of a match in an enthralling way. In favor of long, close-up shots, Safdie has specifically designed the game as being not just a challenge of elaborate hand-eye coordination, but an intimate duel between two athletes who must study the strategies employed by their opponent as much as their own handiwork and technique. The two-hours-and-change screenplay cleverly mirrors the physical back-and-forth of the sport with the many tumultuous back-and-forth predicaments of Marty’s personal life. He’s whacking the proverbial orange ball between the exhilarating and the mundane, between stability and entropy, between failure and redemption, and between familiar love and something newer and more scandalous.
After negotiating his way into staying at The Ritz Hotel in London, Marty spots the movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, best she’s been in years) checking in with her powerful husband Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary, of “Shark Tank” fame), and is immediately bewitched. Like most things in Marty’s life, he’s able to get her too, all with just some sweet-talking and forced naivete. Before long, he’s made it into her heart and her bed, but it takes a bit longer, however, for Kay to realize that she was just another trophy for Marty to score and then ultimately give a run for their money. And, among the several other open-ended engagements set up throughout “Marty Supreme,” this bomb blows up right in his face by the end.
Everyone that could help and support Marty, the guy pushes away, and he instead opts for a whole ensemble of shady characters who might provide him financial compensation but with strings attached. After losing to the Japan world champion Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), Marty thinks he has disgraced the whole nation and must scrape together enough cash to fly to Tokyo a year later to regain his fame in the next championship. It’s a slapdash extravaganza of screwball comedy origins as Marty gets himself involved in situations that may earn him a big buck, but that he has no way of getting out of if they don’t. Safdie has collaborated with his brother Benny (who independently directed his own movie “The Smashing Machine” this year, too) in the hustler’s territory before with “Uncut Gems,” which set an exceptional precedent for this kind of overwhelming music+sound+overlapping dialogue phantasmagoria. Safdie’s signature display of frantic pandemonium has become a brand by this point, and it perfectly matches the movie’s near-destructive sensibilities.
The director is also practicing the sort of stunt casting that always boosts a Safdie film to the next level (i.e. Kevin Garnett in "Uncut Gems"). Marty’s best friend Wally is played by pop star Tyler, The Creator, while the film also features O’Leary, otherwise known as “Mr. Wonderful,” taking his first shot at acting, and he’s one of the very best parts of the movie, playing a kind of capitalist colonialist snob who’s the biggest obstacle standing between Marty and his dreams. Safdie’s use of non-actors well integrated among these professionals—Chalamet, Paltrow, the tough-as-nails Abel Ferrara—gives the experience a rawer, exotic quality that’s incredibly charming because everybody’s super committed to their parts.
Chalamet delivers one of the best performances of his young career as the wastrel Marty, certainly the worldliest and most nuanced character he’s played yet. Though I’d argue his transformation into Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown” (another film where Chalamet’s character is switching between two women) was a more impressive act, and his iterations of Paul Atreides in “Dune,” and The Candy Man in “Wonka” were more whimsically memorable, “Marty Supreme” shows how he’s matured technically and emotionally. Unlike a lot of actors of his generation, Chalamet isn’t trying to farm social media clips from his performance; he’s really trying to act. Notice his desperate mannerisms as it dawns on him that he’s digging himself deeper and deeper into an inescapable hole and his dreams are slipping from his fingertips. Notice the curt, manipulative smirk on his face as he’s on the phone with Kay, versus the genuine emotion and tenderness he shows when he’s with Rachel. Notice the intensity in his eyes during a ping pong match, when the world around him disappears and he can focus solely on the game.
Criticisms have already been made that Marty’s careless unreliability and obsessive, self-indulgent behaviors make him hard to like as a protagonist. That’s exactly the point. At its core, “Marty Supreme” is a deconstructive examination of the American dream, and the armies of people caught up in the corrupt machine. Rising from nothing, Marty was smart and resourceful enough to operate despite the machinations, and use his wits to become somebody more than a cog. It bothers people like Rockwell, who rely on these lower classes to enhance their wealth and power. If Marty’s to be appreciated at all, it will only be for matters of monetization. Marty’s personal drive for supremacy is used as a cover for enhancing the commercial agendas of 1950s America.
Where “Marty Supreme” falls short is ultimately in its characterizations of everybody else. Between this movie and “The Smashing Machine,” it’s clear the Safdies don’t know how to write women very well. Both Kay and Rachel get underdeveloped as individual personalities and become less like characters of their own than merely support systems for Marty, who needs constant validation in order to keep himself going. The too-muchness of the movie becomes a lot, particularly in sideplots involving a missing dog that distract from the central message at hand. The bigger picture remains unchanged; so much is going on in this guy’s life.
In its oversized, fictional way, there’s the sense that the movie does strike some parallels with the social-political status of the 2020s. Whether it’s intentional or the nature of the underdog story just lends itself to it, “Marty Supreme” simultaneously feels like a film of the 50s, the 80s, the 90s, and the now, between the strong visual aesthetic, retro needle drops, and contemporary messaging. The hottest modern faces are telling the stories of their grandfathers, stepping into shoes that could be shopworn as much as they could be fresh. Certain moments seem pulled straight from the defining American sports movies like “Rocky,” while others are evocative of modern classics like “Challengers.” The “golden days” of America are transitioning into an encroaching consumerist culture. It’s the old and the new, existing interchangeably. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Now playing in theaters.