The degree to which Marty Supreme—Josh Safdie’s live-wire tale of American gumption and hustle, starring Timothée Chalamet in a career performance—works for you is likely to depend on how you feel about Chalamet himself. If you plug into the star’s rich commitment to craft, you’ll be gobsmacked. But if you’re mainly trying to empathize with his scheming, 1950s ping-pong phenom looking out solely for number one—well, mileage may vary.
And let it be said that Marty Supreme is one hellacious rush of a movie. The Safdies went solo this year, with brother Benny helming the wrestling saga The Smashing Machine (which failed to smash much of anything), while Josh doubled down on the brothers’ signature style of hyperactive overload to deliver this superbly assembled film, one of 2025’s high-bar technical achievements. If you can get on Safdie’s wavelength—style, energy, ballsiness—chances are you’ll love it.
Safdie wrote the screenplay with Ronald Bronstein, and they’ve handed Chalamet a doozy of a role in Marty Mauser, loosely inspired by real-life table-tennis hustler Marty Reisman. Reisman’s 1974 autobiography, The Money Player, informed the movie (which is largely fiction), less as a direct source than an attitudinal influence of egocentricity, self-mythologizing and forward motion, sans any doubt.
We meet Marty in signature motion as a fast-talking shoe salesman working his uncle’s Lower East Side shop in 1952 (Safdie mounting a vividly convincing post-war milieu anachronistically piqued with 80s period music like Tears for Fears and Alphaville). Marty works the customers just as hard as he works himself, convinced he’s meant for something far bigger. In the opening scene, he attempts to con a suspicious buyer into a pair of ill-fitting shoes. He may be young, but he isn’t learning to hustle as much as practicing what’s to come on a smaller scale. Despite his perceived lowly station, what he has in abundance is confidence: grandiose, motor-mouthed and backed up by an undeniable command of ping pong.
If you think you know where this is going, Safdie isn’t interested in the usual, familiar sports-movie arc. There’s no inspirational training montage or mentor waiting in the wings. Instead, Marty Supreme piles on scams, detours and sudden jolts of violence. It’s less about progress than momentum—about what happens when someone unapologetically keeps lunging forward at great expense to others.
Marty longs to be great (not unlike Chalamet, who espoused such ambitions in his SAG Awards acceptance last season) and since his lower Manhattan milieu simply won’t do, he scams cash from his uncle’s safe (but hey, the money was back pay, right?). Meanwhile, his married, desperate hookup and sometimes girlfriend, Rachel (an excellent Odessa A’zion), is pregnant with his child, an inconvenience that will not deter him.
Marty is broke, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t got notoriety and a reputation as an ace ping-pong champ. But what he wants is to be known as the best there ever was, and that means getting to a tournament in London, where he seduces retired movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow); it helps that her husband is business magnate pen salesman Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), whom Marty wants to fund his ride to the ping-pong world championship in Japan.
But all of this is much too linear a plot description, as Safdie chaotically zips into digressions, including the disappearance of a beloved dog, torching of a gas station, a bathtub plunging violently through the ceiling of a fleabag tenement and a colorful collection of nefarious thugs always in pursuit, including a terrific Abel Ferrara as career criminal Ezra Mishkin.
By the time we reach Marty Supreme’s apex sequence—a frenzied, Japan-set match between Marty and reigning champion Koto Endo (real-life champ Koto Kawaguchi)—Safdie eschews a typical feel-good climax. Instead, the match is tense and draining; mere victory feels joyless. Where can he go from here? It turns out to be the one place the movie hasn’t taken him.
This is a lot for the movie to chew on, and Sadie’s tale of a scurrilous hustler’s mentality is, at its core, a study in human self-possession. Or maybe tunnel-minded American ingenuity, particularly in a post-war America following World War II, and the tension between working in the shoe shop and aiming low versus self-actualizing (Marty’s view of the American Dream) is really what Safdie is getting at. Through this lens, Marty’s ethos to keep pushing and manipulating isn’t so much a failing to be judged as it is an unshakable worldview. Whether you “like” him may depend on your opinion of his anti-heroic perception of a world where success is to be seized by any means necessary, and one where if you just strive hard enough, morality is irrelevant.
Chalamet works hard throughout, running hot in every scene as if electrically charged. At times a preternaturally sensitive performer, the star here works against that nature with a newly high-strung bravado that seldom wavers; his sustained self-absorption drives and shapes every interaction. Paltrow is terrific here also, her Kay on the downslope, looking for artist redemption and sexual escape from a most gilded cage; her scenes with Chalamet sting (and sometimes move) with transactional hunger and biting cynicism. Also along for the ride are a murderer’s row of star cameos, including filmmaker Ferrara, Fran Drescher as Marty’s put-upon mother, Sandra Bernhard, musician Tyler the Creator, David Mamet and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi.
In some sense, Marty Supreme plays like a kindred spirit to the Safdies’ 2019 Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler gave his best movie performance as a Manhattan jewelry-row shark drowning in debt and trouble; like Marty Supreme, it was a high-anxiety tightrope both exciting and exhausting (though I’d argue a tad more satisfying). And like Sandler, Chalamet flies high on Safdie’s frenzied wavelength, where more is always more, only coming down (or up for air) in the film’s final moment, which you’ll either buy as Marty’s singular moment of humanity or dismiss as contrivance; both reactions are valid. Either way, Chalamet gives Marty such a showy Oscar moment that you almost have to hand it to him. It’s a risk-reward performance that reminds us why many of us thought he should have taken the gold for 2017’s Call Me by Your Name. He may well do this time.
3 stars
