‘MARTY SUPREME’ Serves Up Another High-Tension Safdie Classic

Within the very first minutes of Marty Supreme, one thing is very clear: Josh had the juice. After the split between writing/directing duo Josh and Benny Safdie, each brother struck out to make their own riff on the sports drama. Benny’s The Smashing Machine, a shockingly flat biopic about Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) and the early days of the UFC, revealed that, as I put it in my review, “he might not only benefit from a creative partner but actually need one. Alone, his work is startlingly inert.” The opposite is true of Josh Safdie. Marty Supreme, his fictionalized sports drama about a grifter table tennis player played by Timothée Chalamet in his best onscreen role yet, has more kinetic life and effortless energy in just the opening scene than the entirety of The Smashing Machine. While it’s not my intent to pit brother against brother in some carnivorous blood match of talent, it is striking to see the cinematic results of their cleaved relationship in such an apples-to-apples comparison. There is no contest: Marty Supreme reigns supreme.

Chalamet embodies Marty Mauser inside and out, a young man who only dreams of being the world table tennis champion. The only thing standing in his way is, well, basically everything. He works at his uncle’s shoe store to scrape together the funds to self-finance his travel to various ping-pong tournaments. That’s because no one in his life really believes in him, encouraging him to abandon the ping-pong meshuggahs and adopt some real responsibility. On a more macro scale, the entire country barely cares about his vocation. He’s got no support, no funds, and no real finish line—even if he does become the A1 of the sport. Nevertheless, he ping-pongs from one scheme to another just to try to make it one more step along his pipe dream journey.

And the struggle couldn’t happen to a more deserving Lower East Side Jew. From our very first encounter with Marty, we’re perfumed with his snake oil sleaze. He’s a charlatan in almost every aspect of his life—always up to some con to finagle cash or scheming a way to satiate his most immediate impulses, including sleeping with his married “friend,” Rachel (Odessa A’Zion, in a truly breakout turn). Nevertheless, Marty tilts toward tabletop glory, fully aware that he’s the only one who believes in his dreams—and in his ability to achieve them—and willing to stop at nothing to prove he’s the greatest to ever do it. Unlike every other aspect of his life where Marty is a degenerate grifter, he’s not lying here: he truly is one of the elite players in his sport. And while other countries—particularly Japan, with their penitent rising star Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi)—invest real attention (financial and otherwise) into the sport’s rising popularity, America barely sees it as a pastime. So Marty’s aspirations come across as the hallucinations of a madman. And mad this man is.

The script from Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein doesn’t shy away from Marty’s more prickly side, injecting him early and often into compromising situations—scenes as heinous as they are entirely unpredictable. One grift slips into the next until he’s built a house of cards so high and so delicate that his downfall feels both imminent and inevitable. What should be minor asides—quick cons to scrape together a few dollars—spiral into full-fledged side quests, with Marty’s frenetic chase for the next hit of money or recognition or opportunity pushing him closer to either his goal or his absolution. The experience feels very akin to Good Time and Uncut Gems—both movies riddled with cinematic anxiety and never once taking their foot off the gas. These films could veer in any direction at any given moment. And while Marty Supreme is ostensibly a movie about a delusional ping-pong champion, it’s equally a journeyman’s movie about mischief, mayhem, and grifting.

Chalamet is supreme as Marty the fast-talking, rafter-swinging grifter—but he also impresses as Marty the athlete, slinging ping-pong balls across the tabletop with the sweaty ferocity of a feral dog. His say-anything approach to connecting with others betrays a deep-seated sense of superiority—he doesn’t just think he’s better than his opponents across the table; he thinks he’s better than any Joe Schmoe off the street or CEO in their Ivory Tower. That assumption gets challenged when he meets Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful, in a role he was clearly born to play) and his starlet wife, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, better than she’s been in a long time). Marty uses them both to advance his schemes, only to find he may not have the upper hand after all.

Kinetic, deeply funny, and absolutely humming with energy for every minute of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, Marty Supreme is a coronation of Josh Safdie’s talent. This guy makes the kind of films few dare to: all gas, no brakes, hilarious without ever retreating into artifice or convenient plotting just to boost the plight of the protagonist. He makes movies about scumbags and Marty Supreme is no exception, except this time, he’s made something a little more accessible, and a little less inherently caustic. Nevertheless, he deeply respectful of the moral depravity of his eponymous star, the film tracking its eponymous star down his warped path to glory — where chasing greatness means digging just a little bit deeper with every desperate swing.

CONCLUSION: Josh Safdie proves he was the chosen one with ‘Marty Supreme’, a chaos-riddled epic about a scumbag ping-pong player trying to scheme his way into proving that he’s the world’s greatest. Chalamet is outstanding in this singularly tumultuous and deeply funny vision of going all in on your dreams.