Timothée Chalamet Brings Chaos Energy To This Sports Dramedy Of Mythic Proportions

New York City isn’t so much a character in Marty Supreme as it is the tenth circle of hell, from which the desperate, wide-eyed hustler Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) hopes to launch himself to Ping Pong stardom. What seems, from a distance, like a run-of-the-mill period biopic — Mauser is loosely based on the flamboyant New York Jewish sports star Marty Reisman — quickly becomes a delirious, sweat-drenched fever that refuses to break. But despite all its side-splitting chaos, the movie’s post-World War II musings are far from haphazard. As much as Marty Supreme is an uproarious, propulsive, explosive tale of a sporting underdog, it’s also about the vibrant naïveté of youth, the anxieties of modern Judaism, and the unapologetic ruckus caused by someone casually ignorant of history while trying to leave his mark on it.

Director Josh Safdie — one half of the sibling duo behind Good Time and Uncut Gems — re-teams with several of his usual collaborators, and turns in an unholy IV drip of Red Bull and jet fuel. It’s a two and a half hour Rocky-esque saga in which the traditional comeback training montage unspools into its own kinetic crime caper detour, about a German Shepherd named Moses and his scenery-chewing owner (Abel Ferrara). The screen becomes filled with a cavalcade of unexpected (and wonderfully human) faces, the likes of which Josh and brother Benny have long cast from among nonprofessionals. But while Benny’s recent outing, The Smashing Machine, treaded compelling but familiar biopic ground, Marty Supreme scratches that very particular, unapologetically Jewish, deeply anxiety-inducing itch the Safdies became known for with kitchen-sink New York thrillers like Heaven Knows What.

The vise-grip tension of the pair’s prior films is writ large in Safdie’s solo effort. The frenetic camera, courtesy of ace cinematographer Darius Khondji, captures the sprawling, livewire ensemble around tight bends, and with long lenses that surveil them in intimate quarters. The film’s immediate jump to close ups and overlapping arguments throws us into the deep end as it introduces its roster, from the fast-talking Mauser, to his overbearing uncle Murray Norkin (Larry Ratso Sloman) whose rundown shoe store he still works at, to his married childhood best friend Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), a pet shop clerk with whom he still has a fling — and many, many more. After half-heartedly holding up his obedient cousin Llyod (Ralph Colucci) at gunpoint, Mauser scrounges up the cash he needs to fly to London for a major Table Tennis open.

The year is 1952. The sport is still on the rise, and the Second World War is barely in people’s rear view, but this doesn’t stop a 23-year-old Mauser from cracking wise about “[dropping] a third Atom Bomb” on his Japanese opponents, or “[doing] what Auschwitz couldn’t” when facing Jewish Hungarian rival and Holocaust survivor Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig). “I can say that, I’m Jewish,” he quips to the eager press, as though Safdie were seeking permission to go to some witty and wildly uncomfortable places. Mauser and Kletzki are friends, and the spry American even urges his older pal to tell stories from the camps, if only as a distraction so he can hit on former Hollywood star and fellow Ritz guest Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), the middle-aged object of his cocky, mono-browed gaze.

From behind thick, octagonal glasses, Mauser pesters and seduces Stone, a role that serves as Paltrow’s dramatic comeback after many years, and affords her the chance to walk a fine line between yearning and exhaustion. She can see right through Mauser’s juvenile bullshit, but she’s charmed by it too. Throughout the runtime, the silver-tongued salesman is also left to navigate the watchful eye of Stone’s irate husband Milton Rockwell (Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, summoning a splendid performance from the depths of hell), a wealthy ink-and-pen magnate whose interest in Mauser’s career is purely financial. After losing to the deaf Japanese virtuoso Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) — the only character who calmly cuts through the film’s cacophony — a dejected Mauser is forced to return to the rock-bottom obscurity of the cramped Lower East Side apartment he shares with his overbearing mother (Fran Drescher). He’s left to hustle and con his way back to the next tournament in Japan, while also having to contend with the reality that Rachel is pregnant, and the baby might be his. Hijinks ensue, and then some. 

The movie’s laughs and mile-a-minute thrills are born not only of the characters’ callous idiosyncrasies, but of rapidly-edited, globetrotting sports scenes, and a fittingly ping-pong-ing structure that sends Mauser flying between zany situations at the speed of sound. Chalamet’s white-hot performance creates an enrapturing, deeply relatable egocentric who thinks he can talk his way out of any situation — even a car crash. He’s an expert liar, so convincing that he can alter his core convictions if it means making a quick buck. Mauser is a cunning dope, but Chalamet might secretly be modern Hollywood’s most intelligent leading man, given how he wraps each tenet of story and design around himself to mold his conception of the character. His scraggly, wounded-animal poise, motor-mouthed delivery and voracious ambition propel the movie forward, summoning each subsequent scene as Mauser practically jumps out of his skin. He’s impatient to charge toward the next thing; the next gambit, the next game, the next rung of stardom. 

Dim basements and seedy hotels play host to this perilous journey, each rendered with the intensity of interrogation rooms. Few films since Martin Scorsese’s late-night comedy After Hours have framed New York as such an invasive space, hell-bent on preventing a person from simply getting by. This oppressive energy is the perfect stumbling block for Mauser, who tries to maintain a postwar idealism despite the pinch in his pocket, giving rise to an unfettered belief in the world, and his ability to shape it. Once he reconnects with Rachel, the film begins to take on uncanny properties verging on mystical. Money and opportunities fall into Mauser’s lap — the movie has too many deus ex machina to count — only for the enterprising athlete to try and eat his cake, have it too, and f*ck it as well. 

Everything in this tale of lust, greed, and unchecked ego comes imbued with practically religious significance, thanks to the camera’s slow zooms and alluring push-ins. Safdie’s visual approach creates a sense of urgent mystery around each person and object, especially when buoyed by Daniel Lopatin’s ethereal, shimmering score, which overwhelms the soundscape in the vein of Vangelis at the height of his powers in the 1980s. Paired with the pointed deployment of mid-’80s hits like Alphaville’s synth-pop track “Forever Young” and Tears for Fears’ pop-rock ballad “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” the film is acoustically un-stuck in time and style. Like Mauser, it’s eager to zip forward. More often than not, it echoes the kind of hyper-active New York indie popularized by John Cassavetes and other Lower East Side mavericks of ‘70s and ‘80s “No Wave” cinema, filtered through a massive budget and an ecclesiastical lens.

Mauser being trapped between his pre-ordained role in retail and his dreams of stardom quickly takes on class dimensions with surprising theological layers. Before long, a dramatized debate on free will and the existence of a benevolent deity subtly emerges from beneath the bedlam. A tale imbued with safek, or Rabbinical doubt, the movie seems to ask: if there is a god, is he even on Mauser’s side? None of these darkly comic questions are broached explicitly, in dialogue, but the movie probes the idea of faith in numerous ways, including and especially by presenting a modern, gentile capitalism (embodied by the ruthless Rockwell) both as a constant source of temptation and anxiety for Mauser, and as a cheekily inverted Hollywood creation myth. The early American film industry was once the refuge of Jewish executives and creatives, who, in the years prior to World War II, succeeded through assimilation by presenting the public with gentile stars. Marty Supreme turns this understanding of the movie world (and the world at large, changed by global conflict) completely on its head, with a WASP business magnate hoping to sponsor a Jewish athlete as an entertainer for hire. In this reconstructionist era—financially, and in the sense of North American Reconstructionist Judaism—anything seems possible. However, for Mauser to accept Rockwell’s deal would mean throwing an upcoming match, and thus, destroying the future he wants, and believes he deserves as a figure destined for greatness, albeit one who thinks he’s being sabotaged at every turn.

Marty Supreme is a film of mythmaking in crisis. Mauser can’t seem to decide on a backstory, but when Kletzki relays his own tale of moral compromise and survival in the Nazi camps, it’s the only time the movie cuts to a flashback, solidifying a benevolence so beautifully weird that it ends up becoming holy. In Kletzki’s memory, he comes across a beehive and lathers his chest with honey so his fellow prisoners can lick it off him for nourishment. Strange to the ear, but gorgeous to witness (and scored like a baroque opera), it’s a rare moment of respite from Mauser’s breathless subterfuge, and the movie’s general claustrophobia. It grants us a glowing vision of what the presence of god might even look like, in a film brimming with cynical characters chasing the religion of money and fame. It’s hard not to wonder if Mauser would ever be so selfless.

It’s unlikely that he would, at least when we first meet him. The movie is all the better for it, given Mauser’s wild and wily escapades to underground table tennis tournaments — whose amateur players he hustles with long-suffering best friend Wally (Tyler Okonma, a.k.a. rapper Tyler the Creator) — and his raucous run-ins with an array of colorful characters, like a stone faced dog-napper played by legendary Vegas stage magician Penn Jillette. The prevalence of other kinds of performers in these acting roles re-enforces the film’s questions of authenticity, in a world that demands selling out in pursuit of greatness. Everyone is performing at all times in Marty Supreme, but some invisible, allegorical force keeps conjuring lessons in dramatic irony that derail their deceptions. For every pretend heist, prop diamond, fake injury or imitation firearm, there’s usually a real one lurking just around the corner, raising the stakes tenfold by twisting every possible screw.

And yet, the film itself can’t help but invent strange falsehoods in service of a more complete and disarming Hollywood entertainment. Its framing of the 1950s as a state of societal transition leads to much mythologizing; Mauser may not have been real, but he’s born of Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein’s admiration for a real person. The movie traces the fictitious invention of the orange table tennis ball (which, in reality, wouldn’t appear until decades later), as well as the first use of the sport’s famous “pen-hold grip” (whose real origins are more nebulous), and even what appears to be the inception of modern “method” acting, during a detour where Mauser visits one of Stone’s stage rehearsals in effort to seduce/swindle her.

Safdie even goes as far as bringing Mauser face to face with the Great Pyramids, which the young grifter believes were built by Jewish slaves (a common myth), urging him to vandalize them and lob off a chunk as a righteous keepsake. He’s driven, above all, by a near-fanatical belief in what he’s owed — a practically Zionist outlook that’s slowly dismantled. Which is by no means to suggest that Marty Supreme is a political screed, or that this dissection is wholly intentional, but its time period and Mauser’s cynical deployment of holocaust narratives echo distinct ideas surrounding present-day political identity. Like Uncut Gems before it (which prompted the editors of Jewish Currents to hold an “emergency meeting” on modern Jewishness), Marty Supreme is steeped in contemporary frictions of Jewish faith and culture, likely stemming from Safdie’s own upbringing by a nonreligious Jewish father. After all, what better way to reconcile the spiritual and the visceral than a protagonist with mundane origins, who fancies himself divine?

The expression of this divinity is through physical texture. The 35mm film grain feels alive; each surface feels incandescent; every flushed cheek and sweat-drenched brow pulses with life. Acts of creation abound in Marty Supreme, including in the year’s most audacious opening credits scene, whose depiction of a backroom orgasm transforms hilariously into a microscopic close-up of conception itself. The result is a beautifully perverse romp driven by the sheer power of belief, yielding nerve-shredding intensity and a shocking amount of blood. All these flourishes act in service of rousing individualistic pursuits that are as woefully lonely as they are invigorating — like the American Dream made manifest in all its lunacy and complexity. Few works in modern Hollywood have leaned into the folly of youth with such tremendous gusto, and even fewer have been fueled by such non-stop adrenaline, en route to such joyful catharsis. There’s nothing quite like it.

Marty Supreme will be released by A24 in select theaters on Christmas Day, 2025..

Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.