Marty Mouser (Timothée Chalamet) is a young man with a big dream of getting in on the ground level of table tennis in the United Stares and become the premiere American player.  He scrapes by at his uncle’s shoe business to save money for his plane ticket to the British Open in London where he faces off against Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), the Japanese master of the sport in the final round and faces a humiliating defeat.  Determined to face Koto in a rematch, Marty returns to the USA to hustle his way into a plane ticket to Japan, but in doing so runs awry of a host of dangerous and unsavory figures across the city and, in turn, frays his relationship with those few who do care for him. 

Josh Safdie writes and directs Marty Supreme, a 150 minutes sports biopic for A24.  The highly anticipated title fittingly debuted at New York Film Festival before embarking on a live wire promotional campaign culminating in a wide release across more than 2500 screens nationwide over the Christmas frame.  Released opposite of A24’s other sports biopic, Bennie Safdie‘s The Smashing Machine (2025), it became somethings of a tale of two brothers as the directing duo took some time off to pursue their own passions post-Uncut Gems (2019). 

In his continued dominance over the holiday corridor, Marty Supreme lies squarely on Chalamet’s wiry and sweaty shoulders with the young actor occupying almost every scene of the film and allows him to stretch into both realms of frenzy and absurdity with freedom and intensity that his other roles had only scratched at.  In a role that could easily have overwhelmed and consumed any actor, Chalamet does well and identifies a few ticks and accents that he can anchor the rest of the performance with when everything around his character descends into chaos.  By doing this, along with basic acting tactic of determining the characters ultimate driving goal, he is able to keep Marty the same character in his core that we meet from the beginning all the way through to the end of the narrative so that we do not feel cheated by the freewheeling nature of the story on the page.  It is not a perfectly transformative role, but it is one of Chalamet’s strongest to date in an already impressive resume, and while one struggles to think of a name in his class that would have been a better fit for the title role, there are at times an immersion breaking inorganic modernity about the performance that can be a little bristly.  Some of this could be purposeful as Marty sees himself far and away above the world which he has been born into, but the real root of this sensation lies more in the other creative departments than any real fault of the actor; and to clarify, that is not to say that Jack Fisk’s production design and the work of his reporting teams is inferior – it is quite good, albeit, safe for Japan the various locations lack any real identity – but there are times where the various elements on screen interact about as well as oil and water. 

The color palate of the film thrives in earthy and underground tones, illuminating rooms with hazy golden light that can trickle in giving us the sensation of a smoke filled game hall while featuring very few light-ups; a symptom of modern filmmaking sensibilities that only strengthens the case against this film for its anachronisms.  The most obvious of this out-of-time approach is the use of 1980s tracks to fill the nondiegetic soundscape of a 1950s period piece.  Both of these creative choices work in creating a dizzying sense about the film along with Darius Khondji‘s constantly in motion camera seeming sped up even more through Safdie and Ronald Bronstein’s joint effort in the mile-a-minute edit.  Unfortunately, that same anachronistic quality overflows onto the page – cowritten by Safdie along with Bronstein – and forcing Chalamet to recite incredibly modern sounding lines which undermines the work he did to really try and blend into the period.  While still falling far short of cracking a 67 joke, there is something about his attitude and his vocabulary that gives him away and it becomes a consistent and festering distraction across the runtime. 

If this quality bleeds into the dialogue of the supporting cast, it is harder to tell as Safdie’s ensemble management is akin to the Harlem Globetrotters’ intermission that finds Marty and Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig) playing a round of ping pong with no less than 5 balls in the air at a time in that these ancillary characters, likewise, bounce in and out of Marty’s orbit and are gone by the time we really begin to recognize they are there.  That being said, like a peskier ping pong ball, they all come ricocheting back at Marty, often with more force and fervor having most likely left their last scene being hustled in one way or another by the aspiring star, but more often than not the only reason they are back in the same room as Marty is because it was Marty who went crawling back to them for one last hustle. This tail between the legs – but too brazen to admit it – quality about Marty, while interesting to watch in the moment results is a very loose narrative experience overall as nothing ever seems to build or amount to any true tension. These collection of bombastic scenes and sequences are designed t overwhelm the audience, but beyond just featuring the same rotating cast of angrier and angrier supporting players, the overall arc of the film is incredibly shallow but we do not realize that until we can finally catch our breath at the credits.

One of the more catastrophic transient forces in Marty’s life is Ezra Mishkin (Abel Ferrara), a mysterious New Yorker whose German Shepherd, Moses, precedes him followed only by his reputation.  When Marty crosses this man with shady yet influential ties, he no longer needs to worry about hiding his affair with Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), a fallen from grace film star working small Broadway shows, from her husband, Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), a wealthy pen magnate who was already scorned by Marty on his search for a face of his brand as he sought to ride the wave of table tennis and break into the Japanese marketplace.  This trio act as Marty’s ego and hubris – the true antagonist of the film – personified and help to frame the narrative into something more traditional.  Coupled against Fisk’s production design, Marty Supreme hits the silver screen with all the luster of a textured classic about a great yet troubled man, though Bronstein and Safdie’s edit keep things breezy and modern.   

Opposite this trio of antagonists and stuck in the crosshairs of Marty’s ambition, yet indebted to him simply by the length of their friendship is a trio that personifies Marty’s humanity.  The thematic protagonists of the film are Lion Galanis (Luke Manley), an amateur brand manager of sorts, Wally (Tyler the Creator), the second half of Marty’s ping pong hustling routine, and most notably, Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), a lifelong friend of Marty’s, married, but possibly carrying Marty’s child.  With the exception of A’zion’s Rachel – who is far more street smarts than Marty, so by extension, us, are led to believe – Safdie does not spend nearly as much time with these street level characters than his bolder, wilder antagonists, so that we still have such an emotional connection to these three is a real testament to these performers.  Marty hurts everyone close to him, dangling the worm of loyalty long enough to sink the hook but quick to cut the line as soon as he needs to make a getaway.  It results in poignant emotional beats, and we in the audiences feel a twinge of pride when Lion stands up for himself, a sinking feeling of betrayal when Wally’s wave is not returned, and an overwhelming sense of swallowed pity when Rachel remains with him. 

With all of this detail on the page, the film has some unavoidable weaknesses, mostly stemming from Chalamet’s leading performance.  While his is undeniably charismatic, the role settles down across the runtime becoming one note as the actor struggles to keep the energy alive as Safdie begins to chase his tail in the bloated second act that sets up way too many plot points to be resolved in the third.  The major plot point that confounds Chalamet’s performance and derails the entire film comes in the final moments when Marty returns to New York from Japan to find that Rachel has given birth to a son.  As he stands in the maternity wing and looks in at the baby and begins to cry, it rings incredibly inauthentic against everything we had seen come before.  This is a young man who has no problem cutting corners and burning bridges if it gets him a half a step ahead, and to see him genuinely cry what we are to assume are tears of joy is antithetical to everything we have seen which shows a weakness both on the page and in Safdie’s direction to not support this closing beat with breadcrumbs across his overindulgent story.  Had he instead worked in more emotional beats instead of just loosely related chaos, we could actually arrive at the hospital with Marty feeling like he is capable of following a moral compass across an emotional arc.  Since Marty Supreme actively pushes sentiment out of frame across out time with the film, when it wants us to take it seriously, we have learned enough not to trust Marty no matter how many crocodile tears he sheds.   

Perhaps, though, we are not meant to take this scene as a growing up moment for Marty, and if that is the case, costume designer Miyako Bellizzi dressing him in a rumpled suit jacket just a touch too large so that Marty seems even more so like a boy playing make-believe, is a stroke of genius. This read does make for a much more authentic final moment, but then the crying does not fit well into that reading and we leave the film just as unsatisfied at Safdie’s handwaving, shooing us out of the auditorium. Ultimately, we never quite know for certain if Marty is crying because he got “caught,” and must leave this life behind or if he is crying because his life has a new purpose, but after spending such an extended time with him, unlike Rachel, we are all too happy to be able to leave him behind us.

Flaws and all, Marty Supreme is still an incredibly entertaining film in the moment and unlike much of the rest of what fills up the marketplace.  While the characters slips out of Safdie’s grip, there is no denying that Marty is a fully realized character and one with a brazen ambition who is written in a purposefully abrasive way that modern screenwriting often avoids as not to offend or discomfort an audience looking for an escape, but he is also the least interesting character in this entire universe.  Safide becomes enamored with his own creation, sidelining the task of making an actually engaging story to support the runtime and instead opting to go out on a litany of little side adventures with the “he’s just like me” twerp of his dreams; the biggest victim of this obsession being Paltrow’s Kay whose ratio of interesting character and afforded screentime is the most lopsided.  Without leaning too heavily on the Venn Diagram of what each of the Safdie brothers bring to their films, the one-two punch of Marty Supreme and The Smashing Machine makes it clear that Josh brings the frenetic energy whereas Bennie brings the humanity.  While both brothers made compelling and unique sports dramas each with a heavy dose of their branded flair, neither reach the heights of their previous work together as they awkwardly try to turn their individual contributions into their own unique voice.