‘Marty Supreme’ Review: Timothée Chalamet Powers a Manic 1950s Sports Saga

Table tennis is a curious, quietly fascinating sport. For most people, it registers as light entertainment—something casual and fleeting, requiring neither obsession nor serious labor: you hit the little ball over the net, and that’s that. At the professional level, however, it becomes something else entirely. Almost a different sport. One built on tricks, feints, spins, and microscopic details that go completely unnoticed by those who treat it as a pastime. For Marty Mauser, table tennis is a game he understands better than most, a potential means of making a living, and—extrapolating a bit—a metaphor for how to move through life. In Marty’s worldview, the future belongs to those who bend others to their will by “sending the ball back,” deflecting pressure, overwhelming opponents through deception, cunning, and raw talent. If the ping-pong table is the world and the style of play a philosophy of life, Marty wins through sheer determination, manic energy, and an unshakable belief that things will always break his way.

Marty Supreme also moves at the speed of a ping-pong ball ricocheting endlessly across the table. More than once, viewers may find themselves tracking Marty’s frantic sprints and schemes as if hypnotized by that back-and-forth motion, never slowing down, never resting. In that sense, the film—or Josh Safdie himself—shares its protagonist’s supreme confidence, expressing it through similar technical choices. The strategy is victory by saturation: overwhelm the opponent, keep them permanently on the ropes. Pushing the comparison further, Marty Supreme—and not just because of the shared first name—plays like a Jewish riff on Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese’s epic portrait of a sports star whose competitive genius is matched only by his inability to navigate life beyond the arena.

As he has consistently argued throughout the films he co-directed with his brother Benny—most notably Uncut Gems, but also Good Time—Josh Safdie treats cinema as a purely kinetic experience: constant motion, relentless momentum, a force that barrels ahead and flattens everything in its path, including reflection, restraint, and analysis. His characters stumble into extreme situations and improvise their way out, often badly, leaving enemies and collateral damage behind them. Marty feels like the culmination of all those Road Runners. At times, the film plays like a live-action cartoon—a Looney Tunes for adults—set in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1952 before blasting off “to infinity and beyond.” Everything happens at breakneck speed, with an endless series of escapades along the way.

Marty Mauser (a terrific Timothée Chalamet) is, unsurprisingly, a gifted salesman—but he has no intention of spending his life in his uncle’s shoe store in the heart of New York’s Jewish neighborhood. He wants his paycheck, a plane ticket, and a shot at competing in the British Open table tennis championship in London. And if the money doesn’t materialize, he’ll steal it. Along the way, a casual but ongoing affair with Rachel (Odessa A’zion, from I Love LA), a married childhood friend, will result in a surprise that only reveals itself later. In the wake of the familial chaos he leaves behind, Marty makes it to London and to the tournament of his dreams. In the meantime, sheer charm and persistence land him a room at the Ritz, where he meets Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a retired actress with whom he begins another affair—unbothered by the fact that she’s married to Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), a menacing businessman.

In London, Marty wins several matches, only to lose the final to a Japanese player. His reaction gets him into trouble, and he ends up traveling the world entertaining crowds during halftime shows for the Harlem Globetrotters. But Marty craves revenge. With no money for airfare to the Tokyo Open and saddled with a federation-imposed sanction, he sets out to find a way to finance his comeback. That frantic, desperate, and above all chaotic search occupies most of the film’s nearly 150 breathless minutes: the epic of a man determined to prove to the world that, at least in this one thing, he is the best.

The hunt for those dollars becomes an excuse for a string of misadventures governed by comic-book logic—a chain of tangled mishaps and violent accidents involving angry mobsters (Abel Ferrara), lost dogs, high-stakes hustles (Marty pretends he can’t play, only to clean up once the bets peak), and the people closest to him: Kay, her husband, his uncle, his cousin, his best friend (Tyler “The Creator” Okonma), his mother (Fran Drescher), and most crucially, a pregnant Rachel and her jealous husband, all forced to endure Marty’s endless tricks, scams, and lies, cloaked in his particular brand of manic, oddly persuasive enthusiasm.

These misadventures also provide the perfect excuse to revisit a version of 1950s New York rarely seen on screen. From the impeccable casting—every face seems perfectly chosen—to the period recreation, courtesy of legendary production designer Jack Fisk, Marty Supreme becomes a time capsule with international detours, grounded primarily in the once-marginal neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey. To keep that constant acceleration from becoming exhausting and instead turn it into a sensory pleasure, Safdie teams up with cinematographer Darius Khondji, composer Daniel Lopatin (along with an effective if unexpected soundtrack of ’80s hits by Tears for Fears, Alphaville, New Order and PiL), and his longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, who co-pilots editing, writing, and even production.

In its ceaseless motion, Marty Supreme aligns itself with recent films like Anora or One Battle After Another, works that treat scorsesean narrative velocity as a religion. Neither this Marty nor Safdie ever pause to reassess their parallel goals, and the film charges ahead like a bullet train. Its main weakness—familiar territory for the Safdies—lies in that very lack of pause, rhythm, or reflection. One scene devours the previous one as if it never happened, as though actions carry no consequences. In this kinetic fervor, subtlety is often left behind. What is the film ultimately about? What drives Marty to behave the way he does? Safdie refuses to say, avoiding tidy explanations or psychological framing. While that choice is admirable, it can also leave viewers wondering what purpose this entire odyssey serves beyond the impressive creative stress it generates.

There is something circus-like in the Safdies’ poetics—more so in Josh than in Benny, who directed The Smashing Machine solo this year, a thematically related but tonally distinct portrait of another volatile athlete. Marty Supreme functions as a critical homage—still a homage—to a certain idea of free, eccentric, adventurous lives. Marty carries a trace of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye: a spirit unwilling to yield, allergic to setbacks, determined not to grow up, charging ahead without regard for consequences. By the end, the obsessive, charming, and deeply irritating Marty is finally forced to look at himself—if only through glass, at his own reflection on the other side—and consider that it might be time to stop the ball, if only for a moment, and think about how to keep playing this game called life.