Josh Safdie’s 'Marty Supreme' is a Hyperkinetic Ode to Unearned American Confidence

In Josh Safdie's hyperkinetic and dazzling solo directorial effort, the traditional sports movie is fundamentally reinvented. Timothée Chalamet utterly sheds any hint of self-doubt to embody Marty Mauser, a midcentury striver loosely inspired by the real Jewish American table-tennis champion, Marty Reisman.

Marty Mauser, built slight with acne scars, freckles, and a thin pencil mustache, is defined by an almost absurd amount of unearned self-confidence—a blessing and a curse. The character stands as one of cinema’s most aggressively entitled underdogs, and it is both mesmerizing and profoundly irritating to watch this arrogant table-tennis prodigy bounce between dizzying highs and crushing lows over nearly two and a half hours. In what is undoubtedly the defining performance of his burgeoning career, Chalamet, as "Marty Supreme," compels the viewer to believe in this instant icon, even if they are simultaneously inclined to throttle him.

The year is 1952, and outside of Marty’s obsessive orbit, few people take "ping-pong" seriously or even recognize it as a legitimate sport. Yet, Marty is convinced that table tennis is his definitive life’s calling, hustling relentlessly for a chance to prove his conviction over the course of 149 incredibly stressful, undeniably exhilarating minutes. Within this rip-roaring running time, director Josh Safdie expertly volleys the audience from the grungy tenements of New York’s Lower East Side, Marty’s Jewish neighborhood, to a luxurious suite at the Ritz hotel in London, culminating in a dramatic match in Tokyo.

Loosely based on the slender showman and midcentury table-tennis sensation Marty Reisman, who was known as "the Needle," Chalamet’s character is easily the most charismatic person in any room. With eyes blazing beneath a thick unibrow, and his cover-boy allure only mildly diminished by his geek-chic spectacles and fabricated blemishes, Marty seems to possess four arms and an extra brain. There is no other explanation for the speed of his returns, whether in the context of table tennis or everyday conversation. Despite his spectacular moves, Marty is ultimately defeated in a match. Instead of accepting the loss with grace, he immediately demands a rematch with the Japanese champion, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), whose cool discipline and focus stand as the perfect foil to Marty’s atomic-meltdown energy.

For fifteen years, Josh Safdie, alongside his older brother Benny, served as the creative force behind anxiety-attack thrillers like Good Time and Uncut Gems. Now, in his first solo directing effort since 2008's The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Josh Safdie answers the question of which brother is the superior filmmaker. Earlier this year, Benny (a gifted actor in his own right) released The Smashing Machine, an Oscar-baiting wrestling biopic that quickly tapped out, while Josh, collaborating on the screenplay with Ronald Bronstein, has delivered one of the year’s few cinematic masterpieces.

Though ostensibly packaged as a sports movie, Marty Supreme uses the compulsive drive of its Jewish American wunderkind to reflect the country’s post-war emergence as a global superpower—an era in which national pride, unrestrained capitalism, and old-fashioned audacity were allowed to flourish without the slightest trace of self-doubt. Where others might suffer from imposter syndrome or an inferiority complex, Marty possesses a blind, unshakeable faith in his ability to return whatever life serves him, capable of spinning his way out of virtually any predicament.

Following a strategic world premiere at the New York Film Festival, Marty Supreme now moves into the awards season, having already drawn effusive comparisons to J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye—though the protagonist shares more characteristics with Ferris Bueller than with Holden Caulfield. Safdie and his co-writer, who is a decade older, are products of the 1980s, a fact that explains both the film’s coked-out intensity (likely inspired by films like Something Wild and After Hours) and the semi-ironic choice of period-incompatible power anthems. These tracks are effectively complemented by Daniel Lopatin’s erratic-pulse score.

The synthesized chimes of Tears for Fears’ "Change" are cranked up to 11 and blast out of the gate, providing the kind of galvanic kick normally reserved for the nail-biting finale of a sports movie. Marty is a round-the-clock hustler. While working at the family shoe shop, he pretends not to have a client’s desired size in stock to upsell her on a more expensive pair, thus deceiving both the customer and his boss/uncle (Larry Ratso Sloman) as he sneaks his sometime-girlfriend Rachel (Odessa A’zion) into the backroom for a risky quickie.

Cutting to an ’80s classic, "Forever Young," Safdie uses a Look Who’s Talking-style close-up of Marty’s sperm flooding Rachel's cervix. It is a cheeky sequence that immediately forecasts future complications, given that Rachel is married to Marty’s neighbor (a Stanley Kowalski-esque Emory Cohen). It also serves as a reminder that Marty's entire life has been a contest, beginning with the lucky gamete that won the lottery of his own existence. His father is absent, and his mother (Fran Drescher) is depicted as something of a con artist herself—like virtually all the film's characters—constantly spinning lies to capture her son's attention.

The central dramatic conceit of Marty Supreme is that despite the title character’s preternatural racket skills, few outside his immediate circle respect his near mastery of table tennis. If the equivalent story were set in 2025, Marty might be an elite video game wizard or a sudoku samurai—talents that garner little regard. Nobody cares, apart from the motley collection of gargoyles at the underground table tennis club where he practices—one of the many intimate, dark-shadowed spaces enhanced by Se7en cinematographer Darius Khondji’s eye-of-the-tornado aesthetic.

Without the financial or moral support of his family, Marty faces an immense challenge in raising the funds necessary to attend the British Open in Wembley, London. His mother wants him to commit to a "real job." His uncle withholds his pay, hoping Marty will stay on as manager. Rachel, later once she begins to show, hopes he will settle down and assume responsibility for their unborn child. Marty responds by grabbing a pistol from the shoe-shop desk and demanding what he is owed at gunpoint.

This action exemplifies Marty Mauser: he never accepts "no" for an answer. Because he truly believes he is the best, Marty feels entirely justified in achieving his goals by any means necessary, believing the rules simply do not apply to him. This attitude extends to both table tennis (which occupies an inordinate amount of the movie) and his other pursuits (which yield more indelible drama), such as his seduction of faded movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow). Marty has never seen any of her movies, but the challenge of wooing her completely electrifies him.

Standing on his hotel bed in a trenchcoat and boxers—an image that perfectly defines this impetuous kid playing grown-up in a world he only half-understands—Marty calls Kay's room, fast-talking her into attending his match the following day. Her businessman husband ("Shark Tank" panelist Kevin O’Leary, perfectly cast as the smug face of American industry) can be heard in the background. Seeing the couple later at the Ritz restaurant, Marty shamelessly offers to pick up the check for the man he has just cuckolded.

He is utterly shameless, yet some find him charming. This central contradiction is Chalamet’s responsibility to sell: whether giving outrageous quotations to journalists (“I’m like Hitler’s worst nightmare”) or defending the “honor” of his assorted mistresses (regardless of their marital status), the kid is pure id—a cocky celebrity many want to emulate or be with, but whom even more people want to punch.

In lieu of the predictable glamour and over-recycled character actors typically associated with "central casting," Safdie populates the film with refreshingly authentic-looking individuals—memorable mugs like those of his lanky co-worker Lloyd (Ralph Colucci) and paunchy accomplice Dion (Luke Manley), who would look entirely at home in the outsider comics of R. Crumb or Harvey Pekar. Paltrow's inclusion as a star works because she is playing one, and it takes an actress of her caliber to convey the compromise and disappointment Kay feels. When Marty thinks he has scored with her, he is only half-aware of the subtle game she is playing with her callous spouse.

Following Marty’s unimaginable defeat in London, back in New York, Abel Ferrara appears as a scuzzy street-level gangster who entrusts Marty and his taxi-driving best friend Wally (Tyler Okonma) with his nearly feral dog. Marty, a master improviser, immediately sees this as another get-rich-quick scheme, though this one comes with potentially lethal repercussions. Throughout his career, Safdie has given audiences no shortage of endearingly flawed antiheroes. In Uncut Gems, Adam Sandler’s character was oblivious to how close he was cutting it. For those who experienced that film’s shock ending, Marty Supreme assumes an extra layer of pervading danger.

After losing to Koto in London, Marty must get to Tokyo to recapture the title—if only to protect his ego. Doing so will require every ounce of ingenuity he possesses, along with the help of both women in his life. In A’zion’s hurricane-force Rachel, Marty finally meets his match: a woman who thinks every bit as quickly on her feet as he does, capable of fooling even him at times. Through it all, Marty remains a fundamentally callow character. More than his pride, Marty’s self-centered immaturity is the true source of his hubris, and watching him humbled (with a wooden paddle, no less) proves an especially satisfying form of schadenfreude. Ultimately, the question remains whether the audience is rooting for him to win, or hoping that this whirlwind of triumphs and humiliation might finally cure Marty of his notion that no one else matters. Whereas victory elevated his Japanese rival to national-hero status, it is all those setbacks that eventually make Marty a better man.